Conservative broadcaster Steve Bannon admitted on Wednesday that he had plotted with President Donald Trump to "kill the Biden presidency in the crib" ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
During his Warroom broadcast, Bannon played clips of journalist Robert Costa and Bob Woodward explaining how events unfolded prior to the Jan. 6 riot.
"You look at January 5th, we discovered that Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, was there at the Willard Hotel blocks from the White House with Rudy Giuliani, having an almost war-room-type meeting with other Trump allies the eve before the January 6th insurrection," Costa recently explained to MSNBC. "And Bannon had actually been in close touch with President Trump for days before January 6th. Based on our reporting, he privately told President Trump to have a reckoning on January 6th. And he said to the president, it's time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib."
Bannon seemed proud to confirm that the conversation had taken place.
"Yeah, because his legitimacy," Bannon said of Biden. "42% of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately."
"It killed itself," he continued. "Just look at what this illegitimate regime is doing. It killed itself. OK? But we told you from the very beginning, just expose it, just expose it, never back down, never give up and this thing will implode."
After two years of Covid disruption, the Cannes Film Festival returns to its traditional May slot for a 75th anniversary edition stacked with celebrated auteurs and Hollywood starpower, including Tom Cruise. The French Riviera gathering, which opens on Tuesday in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, promises to balance nostalgic odes to cinema’s past icons with urgent questions about our troubled times.
The world’s premier showcase for the movies will be hoping for a return to a semblance of normality after the pandemic forced a no-show in 2020 and a scaled-back July gathering the next year. Inevitably, the war raging in Ukraine will loom large over the proceedings, framing the conversation just as it influenced the line-up of films.
There will be no mandatory masks or health passes this year – and no restrictions to partying. Still, the continent’s biggest armed conflict since World War II is likely to ensure cinema’s glitziest showcase opts for unusually sober celebrations even as it marks its diamond jubilee.
For the host country, Cannes marks a welcome lull in an intensely politicized year, sandwiched in between presidential and parliamentary elections – themselves largely overshadowed by the Russian invasion. But there will be no shortage of political material on the big screen, with war, migration, feminist struggles and the climate emergency all high on filmmakers’ agenda.
It’s just as well, because this year’s jury head Vincent Lindon, the French actor known for his politically-charged roles, has already stated his preference for “films that tell us something about the world in which they’re made”.
In the shadow of war
In a sign of just how much Vladimir Putin’s war will weigh on the festival, French director Michel Hazanavicius has agreed to rename his curtain-raiser – a zombie fest initially titled “Z” in French, now called “Coupez!” – to avoid all association with warmongers from Russia.
Mirroring steps taken elsewhere, Cannes organizers have barred Russians with ties to the government from the festival. But they have resisted calls for a blanket boycott of Russian artists, welcoming the prominent Kremlin dissident Kirill Serebrennikov into the main competition for a third time. Having twice run in absentia due to Moscow’s travel bans, the now-exiled director will finally walk the red carpet on Wednesday for his latest feature, “Tchaikovsky’s wife”.
Ukraine will be represented by Cannes stalwart Sergei Losnitza, whose latest documentary explores the destruction of German cities during World War II. In the Un Certain Regard sidebar, focused on emerging talent, Maksim Nakonechnyi’s timely “Butterfly Vision” will examine the ordeal of a Ukrainian soldier coming to terms with her experiences as a prisoner of Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas region.
Footage shot by the late Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius before he was killed in Mariupol in April will also be shown by his fiancée, Hanna Bilobrova, in what promises to be one of the festival’s most emotional screenings.
Veterans, newcomers and Tom Cruise
As a bastion of arthouse cinema and the world’s most glamorous film fest, the Cannes Film Festival always needs to strike a balance between auteur worship and Hollywood star power – and between devotion to the past and turning to the future. This year promises plenty of stardust on the red carpet and an intriguing mix of veterans and newcomers.
The flagship Palme d’Or contest sees four past laureates return to the Riviera for more silverware: Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ruben Ostlund, Cristian Mungiu and two-time winners the Dardenne brothers. Other habitués include Park Chan-wook and David Cronenberg, both of them past winners of the jury’s Grand Prix, along with James Gray, Arnaud Desplechin and 84-year-old veteran Jerzy Skolimowski, who was first in competition at Cannes in 1972.
Last year, France’s Julia Ducournau became only the second woman to win a Palme d’Or with her daring “Titane”, starring Lindon. This year, there are five movies directed by women in competition for the Palme, a record for Cannes but still a low percentage compared to other international festivals. They include a trio of French directors led by iconoclast Claire Denis, fresh from her best director win in Berlin. US auteur Kelly Reichardt will finally have her first shot at the Palme, reuniting with her favorite muse Michelle Williams for a self-reflective look at a small-town artist trying to overcome distractions.
Beyond the Palme d’Or contest, Cannes will host more Hollywood star wattage than it has in years, starting with Joseph Kosinski's pandemic-delayed “Top Gun” sequel, starring Tom Cruise in the role that propelled him to global stardom 36 years ago. Cruise will walk the carpet for the first time in three decades and sit for a rare, career-spanning interview.
Later on, Baz Luhrmann will bring his splashy “Elvis” biopic, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, while George Miller, last in Cannes with “Mad Max: Fury Road”, will debut a fantasy epic starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton. Ethan Coen will premiere his first film without his brother Joel, a documentary about rock ‘n’ roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis. And actor-director Ethan Hawke will add to the nostalgic feel of the fortnight with a series about Hollywood’s golden couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Spotlight on the Middle East
The much-touted return of big stars from Tinseltown is terrific news for Cannes, since the world’s premier movie festival is as much about the glamour as the films. It’s also a financial boon for this otherwise sleepy seaside town of 74,000 inhabitants, which sees its population treble for two weeks each May.
On top of the usual stargazers, the festival will bring some 35,000 accredited professionals to the Riviera – almost twice as many as last year but still short of pre-Covid levels, with pandemic concerns barring some delegates from attending. “Asia isn’t back to traveling,” said festival director Thierry Frémaux, pointing to travel restrictions in China and elsewhere.
There will, however, be a sizable contingent from India, this year’s guest of honor at the Cannes Film Market that runs parallel with the festival. The Middle East and Arab countries will also feature prominently, including in the Palme d’Or race, with the latest Cairo-set thriller by Tarek Ali (of “Le Caire Confidentiel” fame) as well as Iranian dramas by Saeed Roustayi and Ali Abbasi, whose thrilling “Border” won the Un Certain Regard sidebar four years ago.
At “just” four, the French contingent in the Palme d’Or race has been halved from last year, when eight of the 24 films in competition hailed from France. But the home country accounts for just under a quarter of the overall selection, with the likes of Olivier Assayas, Quentin Dupieux and Rachid Bouchareb screening their latest works out of competition.
French directors will get the ball rolling on Tuesday, starting with a rare screening of Jean Eustache’s iconic love triangle “The Mother and the Whore”, half a century after it first kicked off a storm on the Croisette. Hazanavicius’s tribute to horror B-movies will follow for the official curtain-raiser, in an echo of Jim Jarmusch’s zombie fest that opened the festival’s last “normal” edition in 2019 – back in the pre-Covid era.
A young Capitol rioter is asking for leniency in his sentencing -- and is citing his own undeveloped brain as a reason.
Writing on Twitter, CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane flags a new filing made by Miller's attorneys in which they argue their client, who was 21 years old at the time of the riots, was not fully in control of his mental faculties.
"Although Matthew was... legally an adult... studies have shown that the pre-frontal cortex of the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25," the filing states.
The filing also claims that Miller was not in full command of his decisions because he was "both drunk and high when he fell in with the mob marching toward the Capitol and when he discharged the fire extinguisher" at Capitol police.
To illustrate this point, the attorneys embedded a photo of Miller "carrying a case of beer that he mostly consumed prior to his participation" in the riots.
Finally, the filing blames former President Donald Trump and right-wing media for feeding Miller "a stream of lies" that led him to legitimately believe the 2020 election was stolen by President Joe Biden.
Miller pleaded guilty last year to felony counts of obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting police, and he faces a sentence of between three and four years in prison.
The four-year-old recognized the low whistle of the Russian artillery shell hurtling toward the Ukrainian town of New York long before his mother had a chance to grab his hand.
"Here comes one," the boy said matter-of-factly a few long moments before the blast of an exploding building echoed across the small town with the big American name.
His exhausted 28-year-old mother did not even bother to duck.
Valeria Kolakevych has heard so many shells whizz overhead in the third month of Russia's offensive that she knows instinctively how close each will land while it is still in the air.
"It was terrible," Kolakevych said, without skipping a beat in her story about a round of fire that had badly damaged four neighbouring houses the previous night.
"And the most terrible thing is that there was nothing there -- just civilians," she said as another artillery shell blew something up near the upper end of the hilly street.
The second impact forced her 11-year-old daughter to utter a soft yelp and cover her ears. The little boy followed his sister's lead and hunched closer to the ground.
Kolakevych took her children's hands and walked off as more blasts rang out from fields that once made up the de facto border between government territory and lands overseen by Moscow-backed insurgents in Ukraine's industrial east.
Shooting from three sides
Russia's February 24 invasion has reignited fighting along fronts that froze over once Ukraine's eight-year separatist conflict in the east settled into a dreary stalemate after claiming 14,000 lives.
Russia initially prioritized seizing Kyiv and Ukraine's second city of Kharkiv in the north.
Setbacks in both have put the onus on Russian and pro-Kremlin separatist forces to break through from a southern flank that stretches from Crimea to the destroyed city of Mariupol further east.
This has spelled trouble for New York -- a town of 10,000 mostly Russian speakers that attempted a fresh start last year by dropping its Soviet name Novgorodske and adopting one first chosen by its German settlers in the 1800s.
Locals say there's no record of how the town first got its name. It was changed under the Soviet Union in 1951 and back again last year after an activist campaign.
Residents say artillery fire began pelting New York a month ago and has grown heavier by the day.
"It is getting really bad. There was a bit of shooting here and there before but it did not really bother us," seamstress Valentyna Kanebalotskaya said while moving her belongings to her daughter's house in a slightly safer part of town.
"But now they are shooting at us from the west, east and south," the 71-year-old said.
Abandoned military base
Ukraine's stretched forces are sending in their biggest guns and toughest units to hold off a Russian advance on two important cities in the northeastern corner of the front.
But the Ukrainian military presence verges on non-existent within the confines of New York itself.
A naked mannequin inexplicably stands next to the open door of an abandoned military base filled with sandbags on one of the town's main roads.
A few forlorn soldiers appear to represent the main defense of a central square that has been bombed repeatedly in the past week.
"You see that crater -- a Russian jet did that," a soldier who agreed to be identified as Oleksandr said, showing off a yawning hole in the dirt road.
Behind it stood the broken frame of a large factory and a chain of other ruined buildings comprising the town's industrial district.
Chemical danger
Oleksandr's main worry is that the Russians might accidentally hit a neighborhood plant that manufactures a raw material for paints and plastics called phenol.
"That is a very frightening thing. Just one direct hit and it would react like a chemical weapon," the 36-year-old soldier said.
"It rolls along the ground and its consequences are very tragic."
Both sides have accused the other of planning chemical attacks -- a charge that appears at least partially aimed at deflecting blame in case someone accidentally hits a hazardous site with stray fire.
Yet residents appear more worried about more immediate problems, such as a lack of running water and gas. Some of the Russian speakers even blame the artillery attacks on Ukraine.
"The Ukrainians come in to fire from the hills here and then leave. And then all of us get shelled," said pensioner Yelena Valeryanova.
She and many other Russian speakers use patronymics instead of last names when talking to reporters out of fear of retribution from local Ukrainian officials.
"The Donetsk (separatists) treat us better," she said.