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Billie Eilish review – pop’s sharpest commentator plays with fame’s power dynamics

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
There’s nowhere for Eilish to hide as she balances intimacy and spectacle, filming her screaming fans as she paces a stage akin to a boxing ring

Billie Eilish’s face is blown up across a four-sided, NBA-style jumbotron. Below, tracked by camera crews, she prowls a bare stage akin to a boxing ring – a rectangle slapped in the middle of the arena, fans everywhere she turns. Such media-heavy, mega-watt staging is immediately at odds with ambiguous opener Chihiro: “You won’t forget my name, not today, not tomorrow, kinda strange, feelin’ sorrow,” she murmurs, featherlight, over distant, rumbling subwoofer and watery electric guitar.

The challenge for Eilish’s arena tours has always been to balance her talent for intimacy with her clear interest in spectacle. It’s unfortunate but perhaps inevitable that the intricate production quirks of tracks such as Lunch and Wildflower get lost in the mix tonight, with just the drums pounding through, but she compensates with astute theatrics; at still just 23, Eilish offers some of pop’s sharpest commentary on the push and pull of fame.

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Ukraine seeks more details on US weapons U-turn days after Pentagon halts delivery

Request to clarify details on military aid comes after Donald Trump says US will ‘send more weapons to Ukraine’

Ukraine has said it is seeking to clarify details after Donald Trump announced late on Monday that US weapons deliveries would resume just days after they were halted by the Pentagon, stressing that it needed “predictability” in supplies from Washington.

The ministry of defence in Kyiv said in a statement on Tuesday that it had not received official notification of the change in policy and it was “critically important” for Ukraine to maintain “stability, continuity and predictability” in the provision of arms, especially air defence systems.

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Studios are rewriting movies steered by Reddit. A dangerous development – or long overdue? | Ben Child

Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts has revealed that his original plans for the film had to be changed when Redditors predicted a plot point

Once upon a time, film-makers were mysterious sorcerers hunched over Steenbecks and smoke machines, conjuring cinematic magic from the recesses of their cerebellums. These days it seems they spend half their time on Reddit, fighting like gremlins to stay one step ahead of the hive mind.

This week, Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts revealed that his original plan for the grand entrance of the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions of Spider-Man in the blockbuster Marvel epic was to have them turn up following the death of Aunt May, just as Spidey was at his lowest point. As our hero sheds tears on a grimy New York rooftop, the pair would enter through Doctor Strange portals at the perfect moment to reset the film and set Peter Parker on the path to redemption.

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‘They have promised retribution and retaliation’: the Washington lawyer Trump is targeting

In representing people suing the White House and publicly critiquing the president, Mark Zaid has drawn the ire of Trumpworld

Mark Zaid knew he would be targeted if Donald Trump won re-election.

The lawyer, who specializes in national security cases, has long been on the US president’s bad side. He represented a whistleblower with knowledge of Trump’s plot to extort Ukraine during Trump’s first impeachment. He frequently talks to the media to critique Trump. His clients include a host of people who are suing the government.

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A baby born to a brain dead mother: this is the horror of abortion bans | Moira Donegan

Adriana Smith was legally dead for months, but kept on life support in Atlanta because she was pregnant

On Friday 13 June, a baby was born in an Atlanta hospital to a woman who had been dead for four months. Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother, was declared brain dead in February after blood clots formed in her brain. Legally, and by all meaningful measures, she was dead then: the woman who loved her family, laughed with her friends, comforted her son, helped her colleagues and cared for her patients was gone then, and was never coming back. But the state of Georgia, and the administrators of the hospital where she was declared dead, kept her corpse in a state of artificial animation for months. That’s because when Smith went to the hospital in February complaining of a headache, and later became unresponsive, she was about eight weeks pregnant. According to her family, doctors at Emory hospital, in Georgia, told the family that the state’s abortion ban required them to maintain the regimen that falsely animated their daughter’s corpse so that the fetus inside her could continue to grow.

The Georgia state attorney general denies that the state’s abortion ban required this abuse of Smiths’s body. But other supporters of the law disagree. The result, either way, was the same: in deference to a law that created genuine ambiguity about what freedoms Smith’s doctors and family had in the wake of her death, a woman who did nothing other than be pregnant was denied the right to rest in peace.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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