You just keep Vlad hanging on … gettin’ viral with it … look to the Sky

Putin up a fight Vladimir Putin has completed his first major summit outside Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. While there is ongoing controversy about just how badly the invasion is going for Russia — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had to fire top officials from his security service on suspicions of collaborating with Russia — footage has emerged that gives some indication of just how adrift Russia is in world affairs:

At a press conference with Turkish leader and fellow “strongman” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Putin is left waiting in front of the cameras, visibly uncomfortable, for nearly a minute before Erdogan arrives. This is not an accident — the footage is shot by the Turkish government’s news agency, and includes close-ups of Putin. Apart from their current disagreements over the blockade of Ukrainian grain and the possibility this represented payback for a similar humiliation Putin put Erdogan through back in 2020, who remembers the last time a world leader was emboldened to treat Putin this way publicly?

Mask slip It’s a mini-trend you may have caught via TikTok, Instagram or, if you’re more like me, Twitter two weeks later when a friend sends it to you: a rap originally done by pioneer in the journalism of cringe Louis Theroux on a 2000 episode of his show Weird Weekends was remixed, put to a bunch of fun dances, remixed again, put to more dances and so on. But in our age, things cannot simply be fun viral content — an agent of the state has to get involved and, in so doing, kill the moment dead. In this case, it’s the NSW government putting a bullet the head of this craze with their video encouraging people in the state to mask up:

OK, so the first thing to say is, much like that “gamechangers” recruitment video the Department of Finance did a few years ago, where non-actors did as good a job as could be expected delivering dialogue more stilted than a circus troupe, we’re not having a go at the participants. The public servants cavorting in this video are gamely trying to make it work — for real, a shout-out to the dude in orange, who can clearly dance and was utterly let down by editing that doesn’t properly sync him with the beat. But the real victims are the older participants for whom this whole thing, rightly, would sound like gibberish. You can see one of them constantly looking off camera, maybe for directions, maybe to ask “So this is going to relieve the stress on our hospital system, is it?”

Sun in the Sky We now return to Sky UK’s coverage of Britain’s heatwave:

You may recall that yesterday we noted its helpful decision to show an inset of what the sun was up to. We’re pleased to report: the sun is still there.

Into the mystic A few thoughts leapt to mind at this Vice story about Instagram-based psychics and tarot readers whose clientele are, they say, “under siege from scammers”. First, we’d argue that the phrase “a psychic’s client is being scammed” is a tautology. Second, it uses the phrase “mystical labour”, which is lovely. Third, could the psychic community not have done more to prepare for this? It put us in mind of the memo The Sun‘s Kelvin MacKenzie reportedly sent informing the paper’s astrologer he was being let go, which opened “as you will have no doubt foreseen”.