Paris mayor under fire for charging taxpayer thousands for ‘work' trips
Act now to keep your subscription
We've tried to contact you several times as we haven't been able to take payment. You must update your payment details via My Account or by clicking update payment details to keep your subscription.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
29 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Echo Valley: Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney star in the plot-twist thriller of the year
There are few plot devices more pleasing than a surprise whose shock value mellows into pure karmic satisfaction, and Echo Valley delivers the toe-wriggler of the year. This pensive, riveting Apple TV+ thriller performs a sort of narrative jiu-jitsu on its audience – using the weight of an early, straightforward twist as leverage in a second, more elaborate one, which cumulatively leaves the viewer breathless and giddy on the mat. Directed by Britain's Michael Pearce (of Beast and Encounter) and written by Mare of Easttown creator Brad Inglesby, Echo Valley would make a persuasive answer to the question 'in a Taken-like crisis, what if it fell to the mum, rather than the dad, to sort everything out?' By that I don't mean that this is a film in which Julianne Moore rampages around rural Pennsylvania cracking Albanian skulls. Rather, Moore's stoic single mother, horse trainer Kate Garrett, uses a particularly maternal set of skills – foresight, forbearance, meticulous planning, sound character judgement, and an ability to call in the perfect favour from her friendship circle at just the right moment – to extricate her troubled adult daughter from a hellish predicament. Said daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney) is a drug addict, and her habit has yoked her to two undesirable men. One is her boyfriend and fellow user Ryan (Edmund Donovan); the other is the couple's reptilian dealer Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson, resplendently hideous), to whom the pair find themselves $10,000 in debt. With no hope of recouping the sum from Claire, Jackie tails the girl to her mother's shiningly bucolic and seemingly successful farm – which he decides to treat, via threats of violence and ruin, as an enormous, hay-strewn ATM. To his eyes, this woman clearly has money to spare. We know better, however: in a dry yet tender cameo, Kyle MacLachlan pops up as the successful former husband still shovelling four-figure cheques into this sun-dappled money pit which has come to stand for everything his ex holds dear. Echo Valley opens with half an hour of relatively low-key scene-setting drama that also delicately sketches in Kate's grief for her late female partner: enough to invest the more suspenseful remainder with enough emotional weight to make it really smack. As Claire, who in bomb terms is less shell than site, the often glamorous Sweeney has been pointedly cast against type. But Claire's complex mother-daughter relationship with Kate – strained well beyond breaking point, yet still determinedly, impossibly unsnapped – is deftly handled by both actresses. In a brilliantly underplayed early scene, the two go swimming at an idyllic local lake, which later serves as a nexus for various murky developments. Kate watches her girl playing happily with some younger children, and Moore's unspoken anguish – if this is her now, why can't it be her always? – vibrates silently through the moment. Inglesby wittily repurposes such modern plot-wreckers as mobile phone tracking and instant messaging into real dramatic assets, while as a director, Pearce is a savvy stylist who knows exactly when to rein things in: imagine Jacques Audiard with a cricket conscience perched on his shoulder whose only job is to say 'steady on'. The outrageous yet methodical nature of Kate's rescue plan for her daughter is, therefore, an ideal fit for him. Echo Valley is nothing like a conventionally air-punchy film, but you can't help but cheer the whole enterprise on.
Telegraph
30 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Trump vs Musk is the final battle before economic catastrophe
Who needs reality TV when there's the psychodrama of Trump's White House to keep us all entertained? As plot lines go, the falling out between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was perhaps about as predictable as they come, but the sheer venom, speed and combustibility of the divorce has nevertheless proved utterly captivating. Even the best of Hollywood scriptwriters would have struggled to do better. The stench of betrayal hangs heavy in the air, a veritable revenger's tragedy of a drama. Beneath it all, however, lies a rather more serious matter than the sight of two of the world's richest and most powerful men breaking up and exchanging insults. And it's one which afflicts nearly all major, high income economies. Slowly but surely – and at varying speeds – they are all going bust. Yet few of them even seem capable of recognising it, let alone doing anything to correct it. None more so than the United States, where the Congressional Budget Office last week estimated that Trump's 'one big, beautiful bill' would add a further $2.4 trillion to the national debt by 2034. Let's not take sides, but Musk was absolutely right when he described the bill as 'a disgusting abomination'. It taxes far too little, and it spends far too much. It is hard to imagine a more reckless piece of make-believe. Musk had backed Trump not just out of self-interest – more government contracts, protection of the electric vehicle mandate, personal aggrandisement and so on – but because he genuinely believed he could help stop the US from bankrupting itself. This has proved a monumental conceit. The $2 trillion of savings in federal spending he initially promised has turned out to be at most $200bn, and probably substantially less once double accounting and wishful thinking is factored in. In any case, against total federal spending last year of nearly £7 trillion, it is but a drop in the ocean, and only goes to show just how difficult it is to find serious savings in government administration even when given a free hand with the headcount.
Reuters
38 minutes ago
- Reuters
Breakingviews - Elon Musk picks a losing fight with Donald Trump
NEW YORK, June 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Money can buy power, but Elon Musk paid for someone else to have it. After spending more than $250 million backing Donald Trump's presidential campaign, an acrimonious schism erupted between the two and swiftly vaporized $150 billion of Tesla's (TSLA.O), opens new tab market value. By picking a losing fight, the carmaker's boss is putting even more at risk for himself and his investors. A cozy alliance between the world's richest man and its most powerful one pointed to a troubling oligarchy. Musk joined Team Trump to lead a controversial effort to slash costs from the U.S. bureaucracy. Tesla sales sank internationally, protests at showrooms escalated and concerns about the CEO's focus intensified. He left his Department of Government Efficiency post last week, with an amicable White House sendoff. The tone abruptly changed on Thursday. Musk's criticism of Trump's signature budget legislation and the president's retorts about government contracts with Musk's companies spiraled into a deeply personal social-media war of words. Musk is a formidable force, with a net worth approaching $400 billion, according, opens new tab to Forbes. His rocket company SpaceX accounted for 85% of orbit-bound cargo in early 2024 by one estimate. After paying $44 billion to buy Twitter, he remade it into a friendlier forum for the president's followers. Any tinkering with the algorithms might swing the tone, as could Musk's bulging wallet if used to support anti-Trump candidates. A threat, opens new tab from Trump to cut U.S. government purse strings from Musk's businesses flaunts the real balance of power, however. About $22 billion of contracts hang in the balance at SpaceX alone, Reuters reported. Tesla's deep ties in China, where it generated a fifth of revenue last year, also may tempt the president's ire as he wages a highly combative trade war with Beijing. Reprisals from President Xi Jinping also could be painful. Musk is doing his companies no favors either. He pivoted Tesla away from mass-market dominance to pursue autonomous driving instead. National regulators have nagging questions about robotic taxi services. A more hostile regulatory environment would undermine the moonshot, leaving a shrinking car business falling behind Chinese rivals. If Musk doesn't back down, as he hinted was a possibility, the costs are bound to escalate. Having already alienated pro-renewable-energy Democrats, he may scare off pro-Trump Republicans, too. An adversarial relationship with SpaceX is probably untenable for NASA. Raising money for his artificial intelligence venture may get harder, as would securing U.S. government contracts for his tunneling company. Musk achieved success by defying perceived scientific constraints, but he is now pushing up against the limits of money. Follow Jonathan Guilford on X, opens new tab and Linkedin, opens new tab.
