Louise Lucas, Powerful Virginia Lawmaker, Indicted Over Marijuana Business

© Ryan M. Kelly/Associated Press

© Ryan M. Kelly/Associated Press
Sagal Abdi-Wali defeats Green party leader Zack Polanski to retain the Holborn and St Pancras seat for Labour
Activists in Camden have suggested the Greens’ decision to back the anti-Zionism motion has cost them votes in the byelection.
Councillors for both Labour the Liberal Democrats told the Press Association that voters had informed them they would not be backing the Green party after it passed the motion last weekend calling Zionism racism.
It is clear now we will come a close second in this by-election. Taking the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats shows just how far the Greens have come.
Voters want us to keep Labour’s feet to the fire on affordable housing, public ownership of water and the climate crisis. Greens will be there every single day, holding Labour to account and demanding the change people voted for.
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© Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Spaceship-shaped gallery, featuring works from Banksy, Norman Rockwell and Frida Kahlo, is devoted to ‘visual storytelling’ – and is finally ready to open
“I’m used to doing the impossible,” George Lucas said on Wednesday. But “this one almost broke my will”.
The film-maker was describing the decades of work that went into his latest project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, as it was unveiled to the press in Los Angeles eight years after breaking ground, following attempts to build it in two other cities. Shaped like a spaceship and towering over the nearby University of Southern California – Lucas’s alma mater – the long-awaited institution finally opens on 22 September. It aims to be a testament to visual storytelling across all kinds of media – paintings, comics, murals, photography, sculpture.
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© Photograph: Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

© Photograph: Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

© Photograph: Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

© Mario Tama/Getty Images
Star Wars director calls AI technology ‘the future’ of film-making and says ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’
The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.
Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”
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© Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
How five months in 2016 that encompassed Boris Johnson siding with Vote Leave, Jo Cox’s murder and David Cameron’s resignation shaped the UK’s future
David Cameron, having promised in 2013 that a future Conservative government would offer a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, announces the date of the vote: 23 June 2016. The next day, Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, says he will campaign for leave.
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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/PA/Rex/Shutterstock/AP

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/PA/Rex/Shutterstock/AP

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/PA/Rex/Shutterstock/AP
‘Innovative artist’, who was married to George Lucas until 1983 and worked on several Martin Scorsese films, has died from metastatic cancer
Marcia Lucas, who won an Oscar as editor of the 1977 film Star Wars and was part of a group of pioneering female editors who were essential to film’s New Hollywood era, has died aged 80.
Lucas, who was married to the Star Wars creator, George Lucas, from 1969 to 1983, died on Wednesday from metastatic cancer, her attorney Deidre Von Rock said in an email to the Associated Press.
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© Photograph: Anonymous/AP

© Photograph: Anonymous/AP

© Photograph: Anonymous/AP
Torsten Bell and Dan Tomlinson criticise some of the arguments in ex-PM’s 5,700-word critique of Labour
Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, posted this on social media about Tony Blair’s latest intervention this morning.
Tony Blair.
What the billionaire class have paid for.
Spot the difference between “Tony Blair says” and “Nigel Farage says”
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© Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Tayfun Salci

© Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Tayfun Salci

© Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Tayfun Salci

© Ryan M. Kelly/Associated Press

© Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
He shot the YBAs boozing, canoodling – and shaking up the art scene. Now the photographer has found inspiration in some other unruly characters: his lurchers. We join him for walkies in rural Suffolk
‘Finn! Finn! FINN!” Johnnie Shand Kydd is having trouble keeping his inquisitive lurcher in sight. Finn may be an incredibly sweet-natured dog but he’s hard of hearing – and has previous for disappearing on this particular walk.
At least the photographer has experience in dealing with unruly characters. In the 1990s, he found himself embedded with the Young British Artists, granted free rein to shoot the hedonistic, chaotic and wildly creative art scene that birthed Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and more. Shot in black and white, these images upended the convention for artists posing in their studios, easels in hand. “I just wasn’t interested in that at all,” says Shand Kydd. Instead, his photographs capture Hirst balancing a tower of hats on his head, Emin in a rubber dinghy with Georgina Starr, a newly pregnant Sam Taylor-Johnson (then Taylor-Wood) and a whole load of partying, boozing and canoodling.
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© Photograph: courtesy of Johnnie Shand Kydd

© Photograph: courtesy of Johnnie Shand Kydd

© Photograph: courtesy of Johnnie Shand Kydd
The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their go-to comfort films celebrates Steven Spielberg’s escapist globe-trotting adventure
The ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius writes in his epic poem On the Nature of Things: “It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person … it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt.”
This feeling of living dangerously by proxy is exactly why I find it so relaxing to watch Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark go through an endless stream of trials and tribulations: trekking through the hot, sticky jungle. Avoiding venomous spiders and snakes. Being betrayed by not one, but two of his colleagues. Jumping over bottomless chasms and outrunning giant boulders, only to be thwarted by his arch-rival and chased by a tribe of bow-and-arrow-toting Amazonians. And that’s just the first 15 minutes of the film.
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© Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Lucasfilm/Allstar

© Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Lucasfilm/Allstar

© Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Lucasfilm/Allstar
She left London because her paintings felt hopelessly unfashionable compared with the work of the YBAs. Now she’s back with a blockbuster show – and the world has come round to her point of view
People say that Cecily Brown left London in the early 1990s because of the YBAs – as if, she laughs, she wanted to get away from them. “I actually had great admiration for the art being made, I just wasn’t in sync with them.” While Damien Hirst was dunking dead animals in formaldehyde and Sarah Lucas was devouring bananas in front of the camera, Brown was wielding a palette and brush. “There was this feeling in London at the time that if you were a painter, you were a loser. I didn’t feel like a saddo for being a painter in New York.”
You would think, then, that she’d be returning triumphant. She was taken on in her 20s by mega-gallery Gagosian, and has works in MoMA and the Tate. Recent shows include a survey at the Met in New York. Her paintings, slippery and complex canvases that are richly allusive and reward slow looking, sell for millions, making her one of the most valuable living female artists.
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© Photograph: © Cecily Brown, 2026

© Photograph: © Cecily Brown, 2026

© Photograph: © Cecily Brown, 2026
Billy Bragg, Caroline Lucas and Kojo Koram among those encouraging people to share cultural artefacts
For some people it’s a Morris Minor, for others, a beach windbreak, chicken tikka masala or Magna Carta.
A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George’s flag or not.
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© Photograph: hsunny/Alamy

© Photograph: hsunny/Alamy

© Photograph: hsunny/Alamy
An epic account of how three demigod directors, in pursuit of indie freedom, redefined American film-making
Here we are once more: back to the glory days of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system in the 1960s and 70s. Our cast is filled with brilliant hotshots and creative risk-takers, energised by the French New Wave, the American counterculture and the industry’s own amazing entrepreneurial past.
Peter Biskind’s breezy, bleary, cynical book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranged freely across the 1970s, with controversial anecdotes about egos and drugs (though maybe the definitive book about the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution had the witty idea of looking at the five films Oscar-nominated for best picture in the transitional year of 1968, from the supercool Bonnie and Clyde to the squaresville Dr Doolittle, to see what they told us about America’s cinematic mind at the time.
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© Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

© Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

© Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

© Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

© Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

© Minh Connors for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

© Eric Lee for The New York Times