Florida suing federal government, CDC over cruise industry shutdown, officials say

Florida's governor says the Sunshine State is "fighting back" against the "unlawful" year-long shutdown of the cruise industry.

Recommended Stories

  • EU post-Brexit imports from UK halve in Jan-Feb, trade surplus rises

    The European Union's imports from Britain almost halved in the first two months of the year following the UK exit from the EU single market, data showed on Friday, and the 27-nation bloc's trade surplus with Britain rose as exports fell by less. The European Union's statistics office Eurostat said EU imports from Britain dropped 47.0% year-on-year in January-February to 16.6 billion euros ($19.9 billion) while exports to the United Kingdom declined only 20.2% to 39.8 billion euros. As a result, the EU's trade surplus with Britain rose to 23.2 billion euros in the first two months after Britain's Brexit transition period expired from 18.6 billion euros in the same period of 2020, when London still enjoyed unfettered access to the EU's single market.

  • Babies dying from Covid in Brazil as ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ hits country

    Médecins Sans Frontières says country has been plunged into ‘permanent state of mourning’

  • Ruling in doping case to keep world's fastest sprinter out of Tokyo Olympics

    Facing a two-year ban for missed drug tests, top U.S. sprinter Christian Coleman sees his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for sport fall short.

  • France urges citizens to leave Pakistan amid anti-French protests

    An email from the French embassy warns of "serious threats" after anti-blasphemy protests.

  • Myanmar releases prisoners for New Year, though likely not dissidents

    Saturday is the first day of the traditional New Year in Myanmar and the last day of a five-day holiday that is usually celebrated with visits to Buddhist temples and rowdy water throwing and partying in the streets. Pro-democracy activists called for the cancellation of the festivities this year and instead for people to focus on a campaign to restore democracy after the military's ouster of the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi is among 3,141 people arrested in connection with the coup, according to a tally by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) activist group.

  • Coronavirus: Brazilians told to delay having children ‘until a better moment’ as variant spreads

    Country’s health system is buckling under pressure of highly contagious P1 variant

  • AOC calls SALT deduction a 'gift to billionaires,' opposes effort to hold up infrastructure bill

    Some Democrats argue capping the deduction for state and local taxes hurts blue states; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says it mostly hurts the rich.

  • SolarWinds: Russian intelligence behind major cyber attack, Raab reveals as US expels diplomats

    ‘We see what Russia is doing to undermine our democracies’, foreign minister says

  • ‘In the Earth’ Is the First Must-See COVID Horror Movie

    NeonNature can be neither opposed nor fled in In the Earth, which—following last year’s misbegotten Rebecca, that never fit his gonzo sensibilities—returns writer/director Ben Wheatley to the hallucinatory strobe-lit horror insanity of his 2014 gem A Field in England. A stripped-down genre affair shot during quarantine and infused with deeply rooted pandemic fears, it’s a phantasmagoric folky freak-out that, like a pestilence, gets under one’s skin, where it festers and infects with unnerving potency. Perched on the razor-thin boundary between lucidity and madness, it gnaws at the nerves and bludgeons the senses until submission—to humanity’s helplessness in the face of the ancient world’s elemental power—is the only recourse.Produced in fifteen days in August 2020, In the Earth (now playing) is not only a companion piece to Wheatley’s A Field in England—a mushroom-fueled psychotronic nightmare par excellence—but also to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, sharing a narrative focus on scientists venturing into a toxic heart of darkness, where they find brutal violence and trippy 2001-style lunacy. The primary subject of Wheatley’s latest is Martin Lowery (Joel Fry), an unassuming researcher who arrives at a remote English facility where pandemic protocols are the order of the day. No one explicitly identifies the disease that everyone is afraid of, but in drips and drabs, the film reveals that it’s extremely deadly, and that it’s ravaged the country (and planet), including the city where Martin’s elderly parents reside.‘Honeydew’ Is a Deranged Vegan Horror Movie Starring Steven Spielberg’s SonAt this outpost, a country home retrofitted for medical purposes, Martin meets Alma (Ellora Torchia), a park ranger who’s been assigned to accompany him into the dense forest to rendezvous with his former colleague Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who’s carrying out unspecified tests in the middle of nowhere. Before embarking on their two-day hike to Olivia, Martin spies a painting (and related kids’ drawings) of a fabled pagan spirit of the woods known as Parnag Fegg that captured locals’ imaginations in the 1970s after some children went missing in the area. It’s no great leap to assume that this myth is somehow related to the film’s opening sight of a towering stone slab with a hole in it (think a more earthen variation of 2001’s alien monolith). Yet at least initially, Martin shrugs off this tall tale, his attention less on campfire stories about monsters than on a practical mission that involves doing outdoors-y things he’s not very skilled in, like building a tent.Things quickly take a harrowing turn. First, the duo come upon an abandoned tent strewn with toys and a book about a witch, suggesting that a family has been hanging out in this forbidden zone. Then, they’re viciously beaten in their own tent by an unseen assailant. Shortly thereafter, they come upon Zach (Reece Shearsmith), a reclusive outdoorsman who offers them assistance—including shoes, since theirs were pilfered by their attacker—back at his surprisingly sizable makeshift home, replete with its own disinfection station. Zach is a sketchy hermit, but since they’re in desperate straits, and Martin is also suffering from a giant gash in his foot, the pair accept his assistance—which, wouldn’t you know, turns out to be an unwise idea.Referring to Parnag Fegg, Alma states, “I think the forest is like something that you can sense, so it makes sense that they should give that fear a face.” Later, she tells Martin she believes people will soon forget about their pandemic ordeal and go back to their prior ways, implying that mankind is incapable of truly respecting, or coming to grips with, nature’s awesome and terrifying might. In this hostile environment, amateur shutterbug Zach opines that “photography is like magic, really. But then, so is all technology when you don’t know how it works.” The supernatural quality of the unknown is everywhere in In the Earth, and Wheatley uses canted compositions in which his characters are dwarfed by their lush, misty surroundings to conjure an atmosphere of the mysterious, primal world devouring these interlopers, consuming and reintegrating them back into its fertile soil.The director’s dreamy aesthetics are amplified by a soundscape of menacing electronic noises, heavy breathing, and unnatural bird calls, creating the impression that this milieu is not simply alive but sentient. The interconnectedness of everything soon becomes a pressing concern for Martin and Alma, including with regards to Zach—whom they must escape, because he’s up to some wild stuff—and Olivia, who’s trying to commune with the primeval stone slab that she believes is the embodiment of Parnag Fegg, and the hub of the country’s ecological bio-network. To do this, she employs methods that are at once technological and ritualistic—a marriage of the rational and irrational that soon defines In the Earth, and also channels The Shining and the filmmaker’s Kill List as it spirals down, down, down into an abyss of schizoid craziness.Wheatley’s suspenseful visuals alternate between spying Martin and Alma at a remove and engulfed by tangled branches and heavy foliage; close-up views of flapping-skin wounds that gush blood and are stitched up with makeshift sutures; and kaleidoscopic montages of blooming flower petals, smoke tendrils, sunlit-dappled tree tops, smashing rocks, pouring rain, crawling bugs, and other unsettling images. The ethereal and corporeal are intertwined here, portending doom. No concrete explanation for what’s going on is provided; shrewdly, In the Earth’s rare bouts of exposition are handled so quickly that specifics are deliberately hard to discern. What is clear, however, is that man holds little sway over nature (and its old gods), and any attempt by the former to comprehend the latter is an endeavor destined to confound, if not drive one out of their ever-loving mind.In its bewildering final moments, the film delivers the head-spinning payoff promised by its preceding passages. In the Earth doesn’t make complete sense because it’s a movie about incomprehensibility. Tapping into our ongoing COVID anxieties of corruption and ruin, it’s a sinister vision of nature protecting itself through biologically and psychologically viral defense mechanisms—and of the futility of trying to change, fight, reason with or even fathom such unstoppable forces.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • North Carolina teacher killed in shoot-out after trying to rob Mexican drug cartel

    Barney Harris shot and killed despite wearing bulletproof vest to rob drugs and cash

  • BLM activist arrested for anti-Asian hate crime in Seattle

    ‘Thank God the light finally changed and I was able to drive off’, said victim after abuse

  • Rep. Tom Cotton: Russia bounty intel 'selectively leaked' to help Biden campaign

    U.S. intelligence backpedaled on reports of Russia placing bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers; reaction and analysis from Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on ‘The Faulkner Focus.’

  • BBC receives 109,741 complaints over Prince Philip coverage

    Thousands of viewers contacted the BBC to say they felt the amount of coverage was excessive.

  • Jeffree Star and friend Daniel Lucas involved in ‘severe’ car accident

    YouTube star’s Rolls Royce flipped three times after reportedly hitting black ice

  • Cuba’s budding civil society asks to be heard as island prepares for historic congress

    Hundreds of young artists protest on a sidewalk outside the white mansion housing Cuba’s Ministry of Culture in Havana’s once aristocratic Vedado neighborhood. Famous musicians long aligned with the communist government poke a finger at the revolution with a song that mocks a slogan penned by Fidel Castro. Rights activists march through the streets demanding greater protections for animals.

  • Can you still get Covid-19 after having the vaccine?

    Pfizer is 95 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 disease and Moderna is 94 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 disease

  • Free food and tickets: How China's trying to boost lagging vaccination rates

    While China pushes a complacent population toward vaccination, a health official's suggestion to mix vaccines broaches sensitive political territory.

  • Biden news: Pence undergoes pacemaker operation as Sanders pays Trump rare compliment on Afghanistan

    Follow all the latest US politics and Biden administration news below

  • Biden expels Russian diplomats and announces new sanctions in retaliation for hacking

    Sanctions follow allegations of election interference and a hacking campaign

  • Exclusive: Ukrainian president warns Russian build-up 'threatens entire democratic order'

    Ukraine must be allowed to join Nato, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Telegraph on Friday as he warned that Russia’s military build-up on his country’s borders “threatens the entire democratic order”. Mr Zelenskiy reiterated his country's longstanding call for Nato membership in an exclusive interview with the Telegraph hours before travelling to Paris for talks with Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel. He backed Joe Biden’s call for a bilateral summit with Vladimir Putin to defuse the crisis, warning that it was a test of “Europe and the West as a whole”. “It is only Ukraine's accession to Nato that can guarantee security and peace in the long run,” he said. “This is a conflict which will decide whether the true democratic order will be preserved, whether the principle of the inviolability of borders will work, and whether there will be freedom of nations in choosing their own destiny.” The intervention comes amid growing international concern at Russian troop concentrations near the Ukrainian border. According to Mr Zelenskiy, there are now at least 40,000 Russian troops deployed in Crimea and another 40,000 in regions of Russia bordering Ukraine.