Sean Combs – or Puff Daddy, P Diddy or “Love”, as he has been known – was a superstar for decades. He leveraged his work as a rapper into a career as a hip hop mogul. His parties were legendary, filled with A-list celebrities and famous for being wild.
Then, last September he was charged with horrifyingly serious offences; one count of racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. An eight-week trial ensued.
The Guardian breaking news reporter Anna Betts has been covering the case. She explains why the charge of racketeering – more often levied at mafia members – was brought. The court heard evidence from two women who claimed Combs had coerced them into what he called “freak offs”, and of his history of domestic violence.
Combs was found not guilty of the three most serious charges, and guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. The Guardian US’s senior feature writer Andrew Lawrence tells Nosheen Iqbal about how much damage the case will do to Combs – and if the music industry is ready to reckon with the bad behaviour of its most powerful stars.
The federal government has started collecting taxes on all types of bank transactions for both filers and non-filers from July 1. The government has increased the tax rate for non-filers on cash withdrawals from banks, while filers are also subject to withholding tax for withdrawals exceeding Rs50,000 per day.
According to the new tax regime, filers will be charged 0.3% tax on withdrawals exceeding Rs50,000 per day, while non-filers will be charged 0.6%. Furthermore, banks have increased their charges, including ATM card fees, SMS alert fees, and fees for using other banks’ ATMs. These additional charges have led to disputes between bank customers and staff, with many expressing frustration over the increased costs.
As the banks revised their schedule of charges effective July 1, customers are facing double the burden in respect to increased costs. The ATM usage fee for other banks’ customers has been revised from Rs18 to Rs34 per transaction. Additionally, the ATM card fee has been increased by Rs700, and the SMS alert service fee has been hiked from Rs1,200 to Rs2,000, a rise of Rs800.
Non-filers will also face a deduction of Rs522 for cash withdrawals of Rs20,000 or more through a cheque. Furthermore, banks have set daily withdrawal limits for ATM users, with standard debit card holders able to withdraw up to Rs25,000 to Rs50,000 per day, premium card holders up to Rs500,000 per day, and foreign debit card holders the equivalent of $200 to $500 per day. The tax deduction will be automatic for transactions exceeding Rs50,000 per day.
In addition to the existing charges, banks will now deduct fees for international ATM transactions based on either the exchange rate or a fixed fee set by the bank.
The disputes have prompted banks to approach 1Link for revising the schedule of charges. Banks claim that these changes will impact banking transactions and promote a cash economy. The increased charges and tax rates have sparked frustration among bank customers, leading to a rise in conflicts with bank staff.
Planes are parked at Noi Bai airport in Hanoi. Photo by VnExpress/Giang Huy
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has officially confirmed that the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) will participate in its Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) during its voluntary phase, starting from Jan. 1 next year.
The statement follows Vietnam’s formal registration with ICAO on June 30.
Initiated by ICAO, CORSIA aims to achieve carbon-neutral growth in international aviation from 2020 onwards. Under this mechanism, participating countries are required to monitor, report, and offset CO2 emissions from international flights through the purchase of carbon credits.
So far, the Ministry of Construction (formerly the Ministry of Transport) and the CAAV have actively implemented the necessary measures to meet CORSIA’s requirements. These include issuing a circular on managing aircraft fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, establishing a monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) system for emissions on international flights, and submitting emissions data for the 2019-2024 period to ICAO.
The CAAV has also proactively studied global and EU-specific sustainability policies, and held numerous consultations with relevant ministries and agencies to assess the challenges of joining the voluntary phase of CORSIA and the EU’s new sustainable development regulations.
In October 2025, American curator Naomi Beckwith will present an ambitious and original project at the Palais de Tokyo, occupying the entire exhibition space and reviving the institution’s carte blanche format. Her project for this season examines the artistic and intellectual relations between France and the United States, showing how successive generations of American artists have appropriated theoretical, political and poetic ideas shaped in the French-speaking world, transforming them into artworks and ways of making art.
This season will feature a two-part programme: a solo retrospective exhibition by American sculptor Melvin Edwards—his first in France—and a major group show ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art and Francophone Thought, bringing together nearly 60 artists. Both speculative and generous, these exhibitions offer a fresh perspective on the historical and contemporary exchange of forms and ideas between France and the United States, reaffirming their exceptional creativity and relevance at a time when they are sometimes called into question.
List of artists for ECHO DELAY REVERB (non-exhaustive) Allora & Calzadilla, Laurie Anderson, Firelei Báez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mark Dion, Torkwase Dyson, Andrea Fraser, Hal Fischer, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Andrea Geyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Adler Guerrier, Hans Haacke, David Hammons, K8 Hardy, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Sky Hopinka, Juliana Huxtable, Char Jeré, Mike Kelley, Caroline Kent, Glenn Ligon, James Luna, Tala Madani, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Lorraine O’Grady, Pope.L, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Martha Rosler, Cameron Rowland, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Allan Sekula, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Oscar Tuazon, Fred Wilson, Cici Wu, Anicka Yi, etc.
Postnatural Wastescapes: research night Wasteland Festival: Out of Sight July 10, 2025
Nieuwe Instituut
Museumpark 25 Rotterdam
3015 CB
The Netherlands
www.collectivewasteland.nl
Instagram
What if nature is not a wilderness to protect, but a system we’ve built? Postnatural Wastescapes is an evening of research presentations, listening exercises, and film that explore the landscape design of waste—not only where waste goes, but how its movement, processing, and disappearance shape our cities, territories, and environmental imaginaries. Part of Wasteland: Out of Sight, a month-long citywide festival dedicated to waste ecologies and infrastructures, the event unfolds at Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum for architecture, design and digital culture.
Artist and researcher Yuri Tuma, co-founder of Madrid’s Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS), introduces postnature as a conceptual tool for reframing ecological thought. Instead of accepting inherited ideas of nature as a static or neutral backdrop to human activity, Tuma examines how “nature” is itself a design, constructed through modernity’s spatial, aesthetic, and technological regimes – often obscuring the deep infrastructural and ecological entanglements of waste and resource management. Tuma draws from the Institute for Postnatural Studies’ para-academic methodology, inviting the audience to consider how embodied research and interspecies thinking can help us generate new ways of sensing, and designing for, the postnatural city.
Architect Carolien Schippers, founder of the Rotterdam-based spatial research studio -C-A-S-, presents her short film Artifacts of Accumulation (2025), created in collaboration with research studio LOCUMENT. The documentary maps Amsterdam’s peripheral waste infrastructures—including incinerators, sorting facilities, and former landfill zones, to reveal how the city is literally built upon buried matter. Combining speculative cartography with field research and documentary filmmaking, the work traces how waste’s invisibility is not accidental, but produced through architectural, bureaucratic, and social means—and builds on Schippers’ architectural research into peripheral urban zones, asking how landscapes of disposal and processing reflect broader spatial logics of marginalisation and erasure. The film will be introduced through a short research presentation by the artist.
Postnatural Wastescapes situates waste as more than residual matter. It is an organising force—shaping how we design, inhabit, and imagine the city. The evening opens a dialogue between urbanism, ecology, and architectural critique, proposing that to understand how cities function, we must first trace what they seek to erase.
This event is a core part of Wasteland Festival’s Wastescapes subprogramme hosted by Nieuwe Instituut, dedicated to examining postnatural landscapes and urban afterlives. Other highlights include the three-day Wastescapes Summer School, bringing together artists, researchers, and students for workshops on buried infrastructures and more-than-human cohabitation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and his US counterpart Donald Trump. — AFP/File
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that a phone call earlier in the day with Vladimir Putin resulted in no progress at all on efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while a Kremlin aide said the Russian president reiterated that Moscow would keep pushing to solve the conflict’s “root causes”.
The two leaders did not discuss a recent pause in some US weapons shipments to Kyiv during the nearly hour-long conversation, according to a readout provided by Putin aide Yuri Ushakov.
US attempts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine through diplomacy have largely stalled, and Trump has faced growing calls – including from some Republicans – to increase pressure on Putin to negotiate in earnest.
Within hours of the call’s conclusion, an apparent Russian drone attack sparked a fire in an apartment building in a northern suburb of Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said, indicating little change in the trajectory of the conflict.
In Kyiv itself, Reuters witnesses reported explosions and sustained heavy machine-gun fire as air defence units battled drones over the capital, while Russian shelling killed five people in the eastern part of the country.
“I didn’t make any progress with him at all,” Trump told reporters in brief comments at an air base outside Washington, before departing for a campaign-style event in Iowa.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, meanwhile, told reporters in Denmark earlier in the day that he hopes to speak to Trump as soon as Friday about the ongoing pause in some weapons shipments, which was first disclosed earlier this week.
Trump, speaking to reporters as he left Washington for Iowa, said “we haven’t” completely paused the weapons flow but blamed his predecessor, Joe Biden, for sending so many weapons that it risked weakening US defences.
“We’re giving weapons, but we’ve given so many weapons. But we are giving weapons. And we’re working with them and trying to help them, but we haven’t. You know, Biden emptied out our whole country giving them weapons, and we have to make sure that we have enough for ourselves,” he said.
The diplomatic back-and-forth comes as the US has paused shipments of certain critical weapons to Ukraine due to low stockpiles, sources earlier told Reuters, just as Ukraine faces a Russian summer offensive and increasingly frequent attacks on civilian targets.
Putin, for his part, has continued to assert he will stop his invasion only if the conflict’s “root causes” have been addressed – Russian shorthand for the issue of NATO enlargement and Western support for Ukraine, including the rejection of any notion of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance.
Russian leaders are also angling to establish greater control over political decisions made in Kyiv and other Eastern European capitals, NATO leaders have said.
The pause in US weapons shipments caught Ukraine off guard and has generated widespread confusion about Trump’s current views on the conflict, given his statement just last week that he would try to free up a Patriot missile defence system for use by Kyiv.
Ukrainian leaders called in the acting US envoy to Kyiv on Wednesday to underline the importance of military aid from Washington, and caution that the pause in US weapons shipments would weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend against intensifying Russian air strikes and battlefield advances.
The Pentagon’s move has meant a cut in deliveries of the Patriot defence missiles that Ukraine relies on to destroy fast-moving ballistic missiles, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
Ushakov, the Kremlin aide, said that while Russia was open to continuing to speak with the US, any peace negotiations needed to occur between Moscow and Kyiv.
That comment comes amid some indications that Moscow is trying to avoid a trilateral format for any potential peace negotiations. The Russians asked American diplomats to leave the room during such a meeting in Istanbul in early June, Ukrainian officials have said.
Trump and Putin did not talk about a face-to-face meeting, Ushakov said.
A week where Ask a Wrench is open to all. Plus, chatting kids’ stuff at Eurobike, Enve’s unexpected development, and problematic advice from brands on social media.
The drowsiness of Eurobike has barely faded just as the Tour is about to kick off. This week, Escape’s tech team members Suvi Loponen, Ronan Mc Laughlin, and Dave Rome are on Geek Warning to discuss the biggest tech of the week and some things on their minds.
A recap of Eurobike is provided by Suvi, along with pondering what the future holds for this event that seems to be in decline.
Ronan and Dave go deep on Enve’s new road wheels, which quite surprisingly, have a hooked rim. That’s big news from a company that pioneered the hookless road space.
Dave poses the impossible question of what coloured spokes he should choose. And there’s a fun PSA related to the countless problematic adverts seen from brands that create maintenance products.
The end of the episode wraps with our usual Ask a Wrench segment. This is typically exclusive to members of Escape Collective, but not this week! This week is a free week and so everyone will hear the full member-only version that includes pro race mechanic Brad Copeland answering a few member-submitted technical questions.
Time stamps:
1:00 – Eurobike recap and whether such trade shows are still relevant 18:20 – A deep chat on Enve’s new SES 4.5 Pro going hooked 33:00 – Canyon’s new Grizl and a new weird handlebar 38:30 – On Dave’s mind: Silver hubs, but what coloured spokes? 44:00 – PSA: Be cautious of maintenance product brands giving you maintenance advice on socials. 48:00 – Apidura’s Aero System 53:00 – Ask a Wrench (open to all for this week!) 54:30 – Footwear for mechanics 1:03:00 – How to find a mystery clicking noise 1:14:00 – General thoughts on hitch racks
Megyn Kelly blasted Charlize Theron as “vulgar” and classless for sharing her perspective on sex and being a single woman on Wednesday’s episode of “Call Her Daddy”
The conservative host began Thursday’s episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show” by questioning why Theron even agreed to go on the popular podcast hosted by Alex Cooper. The actress is in the middle of a press tour for her new Netflix movie “The Old Guard 2.”
“She decided to go on a podcast tour for some reason,” Kelly said. “She sat down with ‘Call Her Daddy,’ the sex podcaster who interviewed Kamala Harris — all about how much they love abortions.” She chastised the actress for trying to act like a “super cool girl.”
On the “Call Her Daddy” episode Theron was asked to give her best sex advice and the actress responded candidly saying, “I am the last person to ask [for sex tips]. I’m sounding very cocky here, but I think it’s because I’ve found this freedom in my 40s where I’m like, ‘Oh my god.’ Just for perspective, I’ve probably had three one-night stands in my entire life. But I did just recently f–k a 26-year-old, and it was really amazing. I’ve never done that. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ Women should be the ones that are like, ‘F–k you, I’m going to have an orgasm.’”
Kelly looked appalled and pointed out the irony that she was criticizing Theron of all people, who played her in 2019’s “Bombshell.” She also made a point to note that she can’t be sued for defamation for sharing her opinion, because she was clearly stating it was just her opinion.
“Maybe she’s just boring and stays home on Friday nights, but it seems like she’s compensating for something,” Kelly said. “She’s 49 years old trying to sound 26. It feels weird. She’s one of our biggest stars — act like it. Have some class.”
Kelly clearly took issue with the open discussion about sex on the podcast and called talking about it “vulgar” and “inappropriate.” She also blasted Theron for her commentary about single motherhood and the role men played in her life.
“It’s strange to see one of our most famous actresses sit down cross-legged with a sex podcaster talking about orgasms and who they slept with,” she said. “It’s off-putting. Then she doubles down on how little she needs a man in her life, even when it comes to child-rearing.”
Ironically, on the “Call Her Daddy” episode Theron talked about the harsh judgement single mothers and older women face when they don’t have men in their lives. The “Mad Max: Fury Road” actress said the assumption is that something must be wrong with the woman. Theron added that she felt an immense sense of freedom that comes from raising a child alone.
“That’s just affectation,” Kelly said of the actress’ comments while also chiding her for swearing so much. “She’s trying to be the cool, young girl who doesn’t need a man. She’s proud that there’s no father in the picture. Great. Good for you. People can make up their own minds, but this isn’t how I want to see our biggest stars behave. She’s on the opposite side of the political aisle from us, but you never see Julia Roberts do this kind of thing.”
You can listen to the full “The Megyn Kelly Show” segment in the video above.
Of all the planets visible from Earth, Mars has always felt different. Its soft red glow has caught the eye of sky-watchers for centuries– distant, quiet, and strangely familiar. Even today, with everything we’ve learned, Mars still feels unfinished– a planet full of gaps in the story. Dry valleys, restless dust storms, and icy winds only add to its mystery. The more we discover, the more it leaves us wondering.
Here’s an interesting look at why Mars still has our attention– and why it probably always will.
