Emperor

Jean-Claude Van Damme is reportedly the subject of criminal charges in Romania over allegations that he knowingly engaged in sexual relations with women trafficked by a criminal group.

The 64-year-old action star, known for his performances in Street Fighter and Double Impact, is accused of receiving five Romanian women as a “gift” from a group of traffickers while in Cannes, France.

According to a report by the local CNN affiliate Antena 3, a criminal complaint has been filed with the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT).

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DIICOT launched their investigation after a woman allegedly witnessed the incident at an event organized by Van Damme in Cannes and shared what she had seen with prosecutors, according to the outlet.

Antena 3 quotes attorney Adrian Cuculis, who is representing one of the victims, as saying that “several Romanians who are currently being investigated for forming a criminal group and pimping, allegedly offered Jean-Claude Van Damme five Romanian women — photo models in Romania — for him to have sexual relations with.”

Cuculis added that “the person who received those benefits knew their condition,” and that the women "were in a state of vulnerability, with the suspicion that they were exploited within the meaning of Article 182 of the Criminal Code."

Britain must allow US chlorine-washed chicken into UK markets if it wants relief from sweeping tariffs, Donald Trump has indicated.

It comes after the UK failed to avoid tariffs imposed on the global economy, with the US president slapping a 10 per cent levies on all British exports to the United States.

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In a statement published alongside the tariff announcement, the White House said: “The UK maintains non-science-based standards that severely restrict US exports of safe, high-quality beef and poultry products.”

It suggested that Britain’s ban on chlorinated chicken was among a range of “non-tariff barriers” that limit the US’s ability to trade.

The UK has long ruled out allowing imports of chlorine-washed chicken from the US due to health concerns, with Downing Street on Thursday reiterating its manifesto commitment to high food standards.

Asked whether the UK could allow imports of chlorine washed chicken in order to appease the US, the prime minister’s officials spokesperson said: “Our position on that is unchanged. You’ve got the manifesto commitment on food standards, which obviously remains.”

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The last major polling done on the issue, conducted in 2020, revealed that 80 per cent of Britons are opposed to allowing imports to the UK, and the same proportion is also against allowing chicken products that have been farmed using hormones.

There is also growing pressure from the farming industry to rule out concessions on the issue, amid fears it could undercut British farmers and drive down food standards.

Nigel Farage admitted he would allow American chlorine-washed chicken to be sold in the UK as part of a free trade deal with the US.

Percy Pig’s US invasion could be called to a halt amid fears that Donald Trump’s tariffs could affect sales of Marks & Spencer’s popular confectionery brand which has just launched in Target stores across the Atlantic.

Archie Norman, the chair of M&S, has described Percy as the retailer’s “gift to America” but he told the Retail Technology Show in London that “we might have to change our minds” as Trump imposes additional taxes on imported goods. While M&S is not considering withdrawing the sweets, tariffs could push up prices and make them less popular.

The pink confectionery which sells more than 18m bags a year in the UK and is apparently enjoyed by celebrities including Adele and Olivia Rodrigo, went on sale in the US on 30 March both in Target stores across the US and on its website in what was described as Percy’s “biggest journey to date”.

Elon Musk’s X stands to benefit financially if the government pulls an £800m tax on US tech firms as part of an economic deal with Donald Trump, as a prominent tax campaigner indicated the social media platform qualifies for the levy.

Dan Neidle, the head of the non-profit organisation Tax Policy Associates, said the social media platform was eligible for the digital services tax, which is on the block in negotiations between the US and the UK.

“Technically it’s fairly clear X should pay the DST,” he said.

Ministers have been discussing dropping the DST as part of negotiations with the US in exchange for the Trump administration granting the UK a carve-out from tariffs which would otherwise be levied on 2 April.

The technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said on Monday that “nothing was off the table” when it comes to the tax, which was first imposed by the Conservatives in 2020 to stop international technology companies avoiding tax by hiding their profits offshore.

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Labour MPs have voiced their concern about the prospect of the government dropping the DST under pressure from the Trump administration. Rachael Maskell said this weekend: “I would be concerned if relief was granted in what would be seen as a dash to let the US tech companies off the hook, while at the same time as making disabled people pay for the revenue loss, with their lifelines being cut.”

Another Labour MP said: “This would be the very worst optics: dropping a tax on big tech companies in the same week we announce more departmental spending cuts and give the details about our welfare cuts.”

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According to the National Audit Office, 90% of DST revenues in its first year of operation in 2020-21 came from five businesses. Amazon, Google, eBay and Apple have publicly acknowledged paying the tax, and Facebook’s parent, Meta, is widely presumed to have done so.

The tax is expected to raise £800m this year, rising to £1.1bn by the turn of the decade, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Yet implementation of the Online Safety Act is now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression. As the Guardian revealed this week, US state department officials expressed their concern in a meeting with Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcing new digital regulations.

That intervention should be seen in the context of an aggressive trade policy that cannot tolerate any foreign restriction on the extension of American economic interests overseas. That explicitly includes regulation that “incentivises US companies to develop or use products and technology in ways that undermine free speech or foster censorship”.

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Mr Trump’s power is bolstered by alliance with tech industry oligarchs. The unwritten deal is that the president’s cause is boosted on social media and the platforms’ commercial interests are driven by the president. That is why US trade policy is being deployed against European regulators that have tried to make the internet – or the part of it over which they have legal jurisdiction – less lawless.

Yielding to that pressure would cede control of the digital information space to people who actively subvert it for the cause of American ultranationalism. It would mean accepting that a vital part of the digital infrastructure for a free society operates according to rules set by companies that are poisoning the wells of public discourse.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26833310

US state department officials have challenged Britain’s communications regulator over the impact on freedom of expression created by new online safety laws, the Guardian understands.

A group of officials from the state department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) recently met Ofcom in London. It is understood that they raised the issue of the new online safety act and how it risked infringing free speech.

The state department body later said the meeting was part of its initiative “to affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression, both in Europe and around the world”. During the meeting, Ofcom officials said the new rules were only in place to deal with explicitly illegal content, as well as material that could be harmful to children.

Asked about the meeting, which is understood to have taken place in March, a state department spokesperson said: “As Vice-President Vance has said, we are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.”

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It follows months of pressure from figures close to President Trump over free speech. Some have accused the UK government of failing to protect free expression, especially after the riots that took place last summer.

In February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, complained of “infringements on free speech” in the UK. Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest allies, repeatedly claimed that some prison sentences handed down to people who incited the riots on X were a breach of free speech. X hosts accounts by figures including Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, who were accused of inciting people to join Islamophobic protests.

Since the riots last summer, the online safety act has been implemented as a way of regulating illegal online content. During a visit to the UK, the US state department team held meetings with Ofcom, the Foreign Office and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a US group that funds and campaigns on conservative issues.

Among the group was Samuel D Samson, who previously worked for US conservative organisations. He was appointed as a senior advisr at the DRL in January after Trump’s victory. On the day of last year’s US election, he tweeted: “Today we choose God over Pagan idols.”

He has previously taken a close interest in freedom of speech issues, writing about the topic in the American Conservative magazine. The DRL’s interest in Britain marks a pivot by an agency originally set up in the 1970s to advance democracy around the world against the backdrop of the cold war. Rather than Britain’s domestic affairs, the DRL’s advocacy has focused on the Middle East, Russia and China.

US state department officials have challenged Britain’s communications regulator over the impact on freedom of expression created by new online safety laws, the Guardian understands.

A group of officials from the state department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) recently met Ofcom in London. It is understood that they raised the issue of the new online safety act and how it risked infringing free speech.

The state department body later said the meeting was part of its initiative “to affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression, both in Europe and around the world”. During the meeting, Ofcom officials said the new rules were only in place to deal with explicitly illegal content, as well as material that could be harmful to children.

Asked about the meeting, which is understood to have taken place in March, a state department spokesperson said: “As Vice-President Vance has said, we are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.”

...

It follows months of pressure from figures close to President Trump over free speech. Some have accused the UK government of failing to protect free expression, especially after the riots that took place last summer.

In February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, complained of “infringements on free speech” in the UK. Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest allies, repeatedly claimed that some prison sentences handed down to people who incited the riots on X were a breach of free speech. X hosts accounts by figures including Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, who were accused of inciting people to join Islamophobic protests.

Since the riots last summer, the online safety act has been implemented as a way of regulating illegal online content. During a visit to the UK, the US state department team held meetings with Ofcom, the Foreign Office and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a US group that funds and campaigns on conservative issues.

Among the group was Samuel D Samson, who previously worked for US conservative organisations. He was appointed as a senior advisr at the DRL in January after Trump’s victory. On the day of last year’s US election, he tweeted: “Today we choose God over Pagan idols.”

He has previously taken a close interest in freedom of speech issues, writing about the topic in the American Conservative magazine. The DRL’s interest in Britain marks a pivot by an agency originally set up in the 1970s to advance democracy around the world against the backdrop of the cold war. Rather than Britain’s domestic affairs, the DRL’s advocacy has focused on the Middle East, Russia and China.

The Old Net is an attempt to restore vintage web browsing on vintage computers. It uses the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine API and a proxy that strips out any incompatible javascript and stitches together as many links as it can.

When Adolescence launched on Netflix a week ago, its timing felt uncanny. This hard-hitting series about the malign influence of the online “manosphere” arrived just as news broke about a story that had been making UK headlines for nine months: that of notorious crossbow killer Kyle Clifford, who raped and murdered 25-year-old Louise Hunt last year after she ended their relationship. The latest update showed that Clifford had searched the web for Andrew Tate’s podcast mere hours before killing Hunt, her sister Hannah and mother Carol at their family home in Hertfordshire.

The show’s star and co-creator Stephen Graham was originally horrified by a spate of violent incidents across Britain in which teenage boys committed deadly knife crimes against girls. The actor said these shocking stories “hurt my heart” and asked of him: “What’s going on in our society where this kind of thing is becoming a regular occurrence?” He teamed up with screenwriter Jack Thorne – a regular collaborator who has worked with Graham on such acclaimed British dramas as This Is England, The Virtues and Help – to create a potent drama interrogating this distressing trend. Thorne says they wanted to “look into the eye of male rage”.

The series tackles the devastating and sometimes fatal consequences of toxic masculinity. The manosphere and Andrew Tate are name-checked in the script but the central character, says Thorne, has been “indoctrinated by voices a lot more dangerous than Tate’s”.

Jamie has fallen under the spell of misogynistic influencers and suffered cyber-bullying for being an “incel”. His parents admit that he would shut himself in his bedroom and be on his computer long into the night. They assumed he was safe but he was secretly being radicalised. His story highlights the corrosive impact of social media on impressionable minds and has resonated profoundly with audiences. Parents of teenagers have been watching rapt, heartbroken and horrified in equal measure – with the show clocking up an astonishing 24.3m views in its first four days of release, four times more than the number two show. It tops the Netflix ratings in 71 countries, ranging from Chile to Vietnam. One British police force has even said it should be a “wake-up call for parents”.

Labour MP Anneliese Midgley has called for the series to be screened in parliament and in schools, arguing that it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. PM Keir Starmer backed the idea, praising Adolescence and saying that he’d watched it with his own teenage children. Starmer added that violence against girls was “abhorrent … a growing problem … we have to tackle it”.

For his part, Baker spent a great deal of time on the campaign trail discussing the headwinds faced by indie filmmakers. In his Indie Spirits speech, referring to the time it takes to make a film, he asked a rhetorical question: “How do you support yourself with little or no income for 3 years?”

We posed that question to producer Alex Saks on this week’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast as we explored the issue of why even the most successful indie filmmakers are unable to make a living. Saks is an indie producer, with 24 producing credits that include Baker’s “A Florida Project” and “Red Rocket.” Prior to producing she was a  film finance agent at ICM, where she structured indie film deals and helped director clients get their films off the ground.

“Sean said at his Indie Spirit Awards speech, ‘I’m able to do this because I don’t have kids, I don’t have a family,’ and it’s objectively not sustainable otherwise,” said Saks on the podcast. “He’s done it because of sheer passion and force of will, and probably because he can’t possibly see himself doing anything else, but that is such a rarity on multiple levels. It is a big point to how is this sustainable, and I think the answer is it’s not.”

While on the podcast, Saks got into the reasons this is the case, including a breaking down the math involved with equity investment, which is how a majority of how the films premiering at the bigger festivals get financed. Using the rosy (some would say dream) scenario of a film costing $5 million and selling for $7 million, Saks explained how little money actually reaches the creative team.

Under this scheme, the equity investor floated cash flow to make the movie. They would recoup their $5 million investment, plus a 20 percent premium — so, $6 million goes to the investor. The sales agent would also take a 10 percent fee from the sale; that’s $700,000. From the $7 million sale, that leaves $300,000 to split between the investor and the filmmakers. That means just $150,000 for the creative team, which can include the producers, writer, director, and crew members. The splits vary from project to project, and are individually negotiated.

Under this same $5 million hypothetical budget, the director drew a salary for their services during production. However, if a film takes three years to make, it could amount to less than minimum wage.