Category: 5. Entertainment

King Charles honoured his sister, Princess Anne, by making her a close confidante due to her sincere dedication to the betterment of the monarchy.

The Princess Royal has recently turned 75, a milestone birthday, which was celebrated by the royal family with back-to-back special tributes on social media. 

Speaking of the monarch’s close bond with his sister, royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams revealed that Charles has “complete confidence” in the hardest-working member of the firm.

In conversation with Express, he said, “Princess Anne celebrates her 75th birthday today. She has said she regards each day as a ‘bonus’ after her accident last year.”

“This bonus is shared as in her, King Charles has a dedicated senior working member of the Royal Family who is universally respected,” the royal commentator added. 

Calling Anne the least problematic royal, Richard shared that King Charles made Anne “Counsellor of State” after he ascended to the throne. 

He shared, “The King has come late to the role for which he was always destined, and it is so unfortunate to be battling cancer. When, after his accession and during an extremely difficult period for the Royal Family, he made Anne a Counsellor of State, it was an excellent decision.”

Ahead of her 75th birthday, King Charles also unvield a coin, featuring Anne’s photo and a nod to her selfless service of “duty and devotion.”

Bollywood just got its biggest Independence Day gift with the release of War 2. Starring Hrithik Roshan and Jr NTR in a never-before-seen face-off, the high-octane actioner has stormed the box office right from day one. With its grand scale, globe-trotting visuals, and the thrill of two powerhouse stars colliding, the film has set fans buzzing. Add to that Kiara Advani’s presence and Ayan Mukerji’s vision, and War 2 is shaping up as one of the year’s most unmissable spectacles. The film roared into cinemas on August 14, 2025, timed perfectly with the Independence Day weekend. Within its opening day, War 2 raked in an impressive Rs 51.5 crore nett at the domestic box office. According to trade tracker Sacnilk, Rs 29 crore came from the Hindi version, Rs 22.25 crore from Telugu, and Rs 0.25 crore from Tamil. The momentum continued on Day 2 with collections of Rs 56.35 crore, and despite a sharp dip on Day 3 to Rs 5.18 crore, the film’s three-day total now stands at Rs 113.53 crore.

About War 2

War 2 is no ordinary action thriller—it’s the sixth chapter of the YRF Spy Universe, produced by Aditya Chopra under Yash Raj Films. This time, Hrithik Roshan reprises his role as rogue RAW agent Kabir, who has now gone completely off the grid, becoming a serious threat to national security. Opposing him is Jr NTR’s Vikram Chelapathi, an elite special ops officer assigned to hunt him down. Their clash forms the spine of the story, bringing an electrifying new dynamic to the franchise.
The ensemble cast also includes Ashutosh Rana and Anil Kapoor, with Kiara Advani adding fresh spark to the drama. The film is written by Shridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala from an original story by Aditya Chopra, while Ayan Mukerji takes over the director’s chair after Siddharth Anand helmed the blockbuster War in 2019. That earlier film, co-starring Tiger Shroff and Vaani Kapoor, grossed over Rs 471 crore worldwide and became the highest-grossing Indian film of that year.

War 2 is among the most expensive Indian films ever made, with a staggering Rs 400 crore budget, it was released on August 14.

Royal circles are abuzz following explosive new claims from historian and author Andrew Lownie about Prince Philip. 

The historian alleges that the late Prince had a romantic relationship with Susan Barrantes—the mother of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York—long before she became his daughter-in-law.

The claim, which is made at the very beginning of Lownie’s new biography of Prince Andrew, sets a provocative scene from the 1986 royal wedding. 

According to Lownie, as crowds cheered the newlyweds, “the father of the groom and mother of the bride – lovers 20 years earlier – sat in the third carriage waving.” 

The author presents the affair as a fact, not hedging his words with qualifiers like “alleged” or “rumoured.”

The book asserts that the relationship began after Barrantes became “exasperated” with the infidelity of her first husband, Major Ronald Ferguson, who was also a friend of Prince Philip’s.

Lownie insists he has known of the affair for decades, citing a personal connection through his wife, Angela. She grew up near the Fergusons in Ascot and, according to Lownie, heard the story firsthand.

While former Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed the allegations as “just gossip” on GB News, Lownie has stood by his claims in multiple media appearances, stating that his sources were both trusted and well-placed within royal circles.

Ronald Ferguson himself hinted at his suspicions in his 1994 memoir, The Galloping Major, writing, “I always suspected that Prince Philip had an eye for Susie. Certainly, they remain friends to this day.” 

His remark, though understated, carried a note of bitterness given his own rocky marriage.

This story adds to a long history of speculation about Prince Philip’s social and romantic life, which has often been fueled by his well-documented interest in the company of women and his undeniable charisma. 

Although the Duke of Edinburgh denied such rumors throughout his lifetime, this latest account reignites a public debate over the private realities behind Britain’s most prominent family.

Kylie Jenner and Timothee Chalamet are going strong despite the challenges of a long-distance relationship.

Breakup rumours continue to swirl after the Dune star failed to publicly wish a happy birthday to Kylie, who turned 28 on August 10, especially as the couple hasn’t been seen together in over a month.

While fans grew concerned, reports emerged suggesting that the Khy founder and the Oscar nominated actor, who made their red carpet debut as a couple in May at the 70th David di Donatello Awards in Rome, are “making it work.”

“They haven’t seen each other for a few weeks only because Timothee’s been filming Dune in a studio in Budapest, and Kylie’s been working too,” a source cited the A -listers’ hectic schedule as the reason of their temporary separation. “She visited him in July.”

“But even though Kylie has a private jet, the flight is still 12 hours,” the confidant explained. “She’s a mom and she works as well. She has a lot of responsibilities in LA. Timothée’s schedule is grueling, with very little downtime.”

“They’re making it work though,” the insider added. “They FaceTime most days. They miss each other and are totally fine.”

Amid rampant breakup rumours, Kylie shut down the speculation with a subtle move.

While A Complete Unknown actor missed his girlfriend’s birthday, he has been actively promoting his upcoming film Marty Supreme on Instagram.

Kylie showed her support by liking a clip from the trailer. Notably, the couple also marked another milestone in their relationship on July 1, as she began following the Irish actor on Instagram, two years after they first started dating.

The highly anticipated War 2 directed by Ayan Mukerji, headlined by Hrithik Roshan, Jr NTR, and Kiara Advani, has taken a strong stand at the box office, racing past the numbers of its predecessor War. Back in 2019, War starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff was a game-changer for Hindi cinema’s action genre. On its opening day ( 2nd October) , the film had posted Rs 53.35 crore net in India, a staggering figure at the time, powered largely by the Hindi version’s Rs 51.60 crore. Day 2, however, saw a significant drop, with collections falling to Rs 24.35 crore, marking a steep 54.35% decline. The two-day total stood at Rs 77.70 crore net. Despite the fall, War went on to be a blockbuster, finishing its run with more than Rs 300 crore in India.Fast forward to 2025, and War 2 has rewritten the script. The film opened on Thursday with Rs 51.5 crore net, slightly below War’s Day 1 but still massive by any measure. What stunned the trade, however, was the turnaround on Day 2. Instead of slipping, War 2 soared to an estimated Rs 56.50 crore net of which Rs 44 crore came from Hindi version as per Sacnilk. The numbers were driven by strong word of mouth, Hrithik Roshan’s strong fanbase, and repeat viewership for its high-octane action. This growth of nearly 10% over opening day is extremely rare for a big-budget action film, particularly on a non-holiday and despite mixed reviews the film garnered.The two-day total of War 2 now stands at Rs 108 crore net, eclipsing War’s two-day figure of Rs 77.70 crore by a huge margin. This makes War 2 not only a bigger opener in terms of trajectory but also one of the highest-grossing films in India across its first two days in 2025 so far.For Aditya Chopra and Ayan Mukerji, the numbers signal a strong vote of confidence. Trade experts believe War 2 is on course to cross the Rs 200 crore net mark in its opening weekend, a feat that would make it one of the fastest films to do so in Indian box office history.

A dog lover has blamed uncut weeds for a trip to the vet for his dog that left him £300 out of pocket.

Richard Freedman said seeds from sprouting grass got stuck in Chester the cockapoo’s ears while they were out for a stroll and he needed emergency treatment.

Mr Freedman, of East Barnet, north London, claimed he knew of three other dog owners whose animals had suffered similar “painful injuries” to their ears, eyes and paws.

Barnet Council said it had a “programme to cut grass and remove weeds across the borough”.

“Some areas are left longer to enhance biodiversity, however we are happy to work with dog owners to ensure our environment is safe for all to enjoy,” it continued.

Mr Freedman told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “Pet owners are now avoiding certain routes entirely and the problem will only worsen as more grass goes to seed over the summer months.

“The council has a responsibility to maintain streets safely for all residents, including their pets.”

Mr Freedman said four “bits of seeds” were removed from Chester’s ear under sedation.

When leaving the vet Richard said another dog owner told him their animal had the same thing happen.

“Dogs sniff the ground, that’s what they do, and the council for some reason has decided not to clear the street of weeds,” Mr Freedman said.

“I walk two miles (with Chester) and every 10m or so there are weeds popping up either by the road or all the way through the pavement and I have to struggle to keep my dog from sniffing where the grass seeds are.

“The state of the streets are atrocious.”

British Veterinary Association president, Elizabeth Mullineaux, said: “Grass seeds, or awns, are sharp parts of certain grasses and cereal crops that can penetrate a dog’s skin or enter body cavities, where they act as a foreign body and cause tissue damage and infection.”

Cases are more common in summer when awns were ripe.

Dr Mullineaux said: “They are usually associated with the types of grasses or plants grown on farmland.

“Our advice to pet owners is to avoid walking or letting dogs run through fields of ripe long grass or cereal crops and to check their paws, ears and fur after a walk to remove any stuck awns.”

Veterinary advice should be sought if your pet has swelling between its toes or is shaking its head vigorously, she added.

Taylor Swift unveiled her 12th studio album, The Life of Showgirl and the artwork, which irked some fans due to the major similarities to Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour style.

Fans expressed their displeasure on social media as they compared the two albums, criticising Swift for copying the concept.

In the new album’s thumbnail images, Swift dons a 1920s-style bejewelled headdress and bodysuit encrusted with diamonds.

Comparing the two pop icons, one fan on X (formerly Twitter) said, “Kylie is the one and only showgirl! No shade to Taylor but Kylie is the ultimate.”

Another said, “There’s only one Showgirl and that’s Kylie!!” 

While a third person stated, “There is only one Showgirl and that’s our Kylie.”

However, the Australian singer-songwriter had a different point of view while responding to the claims. Instead of accusing the Lover singer she lauded Swift’s new era through an Instagram post.

She uploaded a carousel post of herself sporting a burlesque-inspired showgirl attire, with caption, “When all your friends start sending you your Showgirl mems!!!”

“Awww. Showgirl life is ‘a thing’, multi-dimensional and so much more than feathers and dazzle [sparkle heart],” she continued, “respect and admiration to all my fellow hard working Showgirls.”

Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour went down from March to May 2005, when the run of shows was cancelled early due to Minogue’s breast cancer diagnosis. The following year, she resumed a reworked version of the string of concerts, billed as Showgirl: Homecoming Tour.

Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl is slated for release on October 3.

I’m scandalously late to The Eternaut (El Eternauta), the Argentinian dystopian thriller that was released way back in April on Netflix. I inhaled all six episodes of the show’s first season only a few weeks ago, after a glowing review on the podcast The Watch (which was also fairly late to it, making me feel a little better about my own finger-off-the-pulseness). Anyway, it’s absolutely terrific, an end-of-the-world chiller that is vividly, realistically rooted in the socio-politics of the country in which it is set. This despite a premise that sees Buenos Aires beset by an unseasonal flurry of what turns out to be killer snow.

That specificity, as anyone familiar with The Eternaut will know, is mixed into the story’s foundations. The show is based on Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s 1957 comic strip of the same name, which proved eerily predictive of the civil unrest and lurch into authoritarianism that would beset the country in the following decades. Of course, the reason for said unrest is very different: in the show and comic, an alien invasion causes the snowfall, while in real life it was in response to the installation of a military dictatorship. But the effects are similar: distrust between communities, paranoia and violence. Indeed, Oesterheld would be a victim of the turmoil he imagined in his strip: having joined a leftist group opposed to Argentina’s ruling military junta, he, as well as his four daughters (two of them pregnant) and four sons-in-law, were disappeared in 1977, and a new appeal to find the family members was launched in the wake of Netflix’s adaptation.

Said adaptation goes light on anything overtly political, but it pulses away under the surface. For example, the show’s primary character Juan (played by the veteran Argentinian character actor Ricardo Darín) has been aged up from the original series into his 60s – old enough to remember the days of the junta and be uniquely chilled by the prospect of societal breakdown. Juan is haunted by memories of the Falklands war, still a traumatic conflict for some. And at a time when the country is experiencing the effects of a new, hyper-individualist rightwing government, plenty have thrilled to the show’s gentle ethos of collectivism as its characters work together to keep something resembling a society afloat (though The Eternaut’s paean to solidarity might be undermined for some by its use in one scene of generative AI).

The Eternaut is just one of an eastern seaboard-destroying wave of foreign-language dystopian or post-apocalyptic series available, and readily lapped up, by English-language viewers. Once the only role the likes of Seoul, Cairo or Buenos Aires would play in end-of-the-world dramas was to be vaporised, flooded or beset by zombies in Hollywood productions, as a way to demonstrate the threat that (the far more important) American cities were about to face. Now though, thanks to the continent-crossing capabilities of streaming, audiences are able to see other countries’ often terrifying visions of societal collapse.

And those visions come in so many shapes and sizes. In Korean drama Black Knight (Netflix) air pollution has rendered oxygen a much-fought-over commodity, hoarded by elites in gated communities. In the surveillance state hellscape of Dutch series Arcadia (Channel 4) the public are given “citizenship scores” that determine their quality of life, while Agnieszka Holland’s 1983 (pictured above, Netflix) imagines that communist rule in Poland extended into the mid-00s, even as the rest of the iron curtain fell, resulting in an isolated and consequentially brutal police state. Meanwhile, the Nigerian animated series Iwájú (Disney+), Spanish drama The Barrier and Brazilian drama 3% (both Netflix) all imagine futures where the privileged are walled away from the rest of a struggling society.

It seems notable that many of these shows are on Netflix. The streamer’s global expansion march has seen them throw money at original programming everywhere from Turkey to Taiwan, and in quite a few of those territories the result has been dystopian dramas, a genre you have to assume the streamer’s famous all-powerful algorithm considers appealing to audiences outside those territories. Which is understandable: the fear of the end of the world is a universal one. What I find most absorbing about many of these series is a sense of hyper-locality, of being rooted in the traditions, styles and concerns of the specific country.

Consider the show Families Like Ours, available on BBC iPlayer, which takes a very real threat to Denmark – rising sea levels – and pushes it to terrifying (and, some claim, impossible) extremes, with its population of 6 million forced to leave the country and become climate refugees. It’s a predicament depicted in a matter-of-fact, almost mundane fashion, with characters shrugging reactions to each new grim development like frogs in boiling water. Families Like Ours is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, the film-maker behind Festen and The Hunt and veteran of Denmark’s Dogme 95 film movement, who here applies its deadpan sensibility to something deeply serious. The result is markedly different from traditional disaster movies, rooted in Danish cinematic traditions and energised by its deepest fears.

The same, of course, applies to The Eternaut. A second season, that will conclude the story, is in production, and won’t arrive until 2027. I definitely won’t be so desperately late to it when it arrives.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday