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    Britain Lost Out on Euro Disney. Now It’s Getting a Universal Theme Park.

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    A yet-to-be-named Universal Studios theme park will be the country’s largest tourist attraction when it opens in 2031. But studio executives have not yet said which characters will be featured.Universal Studios will build its first European theme park in Bedfordshire, England, studio officials said Wednesday, previewing a sprawling resort that could combine iconic American brands like “Jurassic Park” with classic British characters like Paddington Bear, Dr. Who and Harry Potter.Set to open in 2031, British officials said the yet-to-be-named theme park would be Britain’s largest single tourist attraction. Executives at Comcast, Universal’s parent company, said the 476-acre complex would include themed lands, rides, a 500-room hotel, shops and dining.Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, hailed the announcement as a boost for his country’s sluggish economy and an example of his government’s attempt to cut through the red tape that has long made it costly and difficult to complete complex projects in Britain.“Today we closed the deal on a multibillion-pound investment that will see Bedford home to one of the biggest entertainment parks in Europe,” Mr. Starmer said in a statement, adding that the project would create around 28,000 jobs.The theme park, which Mr. Starmer said would generate nearly $64 billion (£50 billion) in revenue for the area by 2055, is a rare bright spot at a moment when the British economy has been barely growing.But it will be years before the doors open to the public as the company transforms what is a bare piece of land about 35 minutes north of London by train. That delay creates the kind of uncertainty that has sometimes doomed previous theme park efforts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russell Brand Is Charged With Rape and Sexual Assault in U.K.

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      British prosecutors said that they had charged the comedian and actor with offenses between 1999 and 2005, involving four women.Prosecutors in Britain have charged Russell Brand, the comedian and actor, with multiple counts of sexual assault, including two counts of rape.The country’s Crown Prosecution Service announced the charges on Friday.Jaswant Narwal, a prosecutor, said in the statement that Mr. Brand, 50, would appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London for a first hearing on May 2.Ms. Narwal added that the charges “relate to reported non-recent offenses between 1999 and 2005, involving four women.”The British police began investigating Mr. Brand’s past behavior in September 2023, after The Sunday Times, The Times of London and the TV network Channel 4 published a joint investigation into allegations against him.Representatives for Mr. Brand did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday, but he has repeatedly denied ever having committed sexual assault.After the 2023 news investigation was published, Mr. Brand released a video on social media in which he said the British media was subjecting him to “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.” Mr. Brand said that he had once been sexually promiscuous but that his sexual encounters were “always consensual.”The Metropolitan Police in London outlined further details of the charges in a news release on Friday. Mr. Brand is accused of raping a woman in the Bournemouth area, in southern England, in 1999; of indecently assaulting a woman in London in 2001; of orally raping and sexually assaulting a woman in London in 2004; and, between 2004 and 2005, of sexually assaulting a fourth woman in London.The police statement added: “The Met’s investigation remains open and detectives ask anyone who has been affected by this case, or anyone who has any information, to come forward and speak with police.”Under British law, it is an offense for news outlets to identify people who make sexual assault allegations unless they choose to waive their right to anonymity.Mr. Brand became a star in Britain in the 2000s thanks to acclaimed stand-up shows that often focused on drugs and sex, and that saw him selling out arena dates. He also became known as a TV and radio host for broadcasters including MTV and the BBC. He achieved fame in the United States after starring in movies such as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek,” and through a brief marriage to the singer Katy Perry.More recently, Mr. Brand has become well known as a politically charged YouTuber. Over six million users subscribe to his channel where he posts videos that regularly include discussion of conspiracy theories and feature conservative figures like Tucker Carlson.On Thursday, Mr. Brand posted a clip about Donald Trump and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.In Britain, strict rules prevent the reporting of anything that could prejudice a jury at trial after charges have been filed. More

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      London Police Arrest Gaza Protest Planners at Quaker House

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      Quakers in Britain said the raid, in which six youth activists unaffiliated with the religious group were arrested, “clearly shows what happens when a society criminalizes protest.”Quakers in Britain are reeling from what they say is an unheard-of violation of one of their places of worship by police officers who forced their way into a meeting house in London and arrested activists gathered there to plan Gaza war protests.“No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,” Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said in a statement issued after the raid.But on Thursday evening, the pacifist group said, more than 20 uniformed police officers, some armed with tasers, forced their way into the meeting house in Westminster, breaking open the front door “without warning or ringing the bell.”The officers searched the building and arrested six women at a gathering of Youth Demand, an unaffiliated activist group that was renting a room to meet in, the Quakers in Britain said.The Metropolitan Police said the arrests followed Youth Demand’s plans to “shut down” London with protests next month, according to British media. The police said that while they recognized the right to protest, “we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality,” British media reported.The arrests raised alarms in England, and came amid a crackdown on Gaza War protesters in the United States, especially on college campuses, where some students have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Self-Deportation Taught Me What I Know About This Country

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      On Jan. 1, 2015, I self-deported from the United States, my home of more than 22 years, to return to the Philippines, where I was born and lived until the age of 9. At takeoff, sorrow overtook the terror I felt at check-in. The T.S.A. agent had scanned my passport — renewed in 2002, devoid of a visa — and waved me through. I froze in place: Where were the ICE agents?That day, I found out that no one cares if an undocumented immigrant leaves America. Only my husband, waving from beyond the gate, cared. He would eventually meet me in London; I was to go to Manila first to apply for a British spouse visa, which I couldn’t do in the United States because I was an undocumented person.America is home; it raised me. I came in 1992, the daughter of Filipinos who left their homeland — an economy drained by dictatorship — in search of a better life. I left in 2015 as a broken adult of 31, still in search of that better life. When I returned last month, I found a different country.My decision to leave the United States seemed crazy, the resulting bar on returning for 10 years a self-inflicted wound. This view requires the belief that America is exceptional, the only nation capable of caring for its people and helping them achieve their potential. After a near-lifetime of being undocumented, I had stopped believing this.In my experience, America had become a place to flee from, not to. At the time I lived in New York without papers, I couldn’t secure a license to drive, afford to go to college, start a career, get health care, vote, open a bank account or travel freely. My life was a struggle with domestic and sexual violence, financial hardship and suicide attempts. By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what remained of my actual life.In the years before I left New York City, in my 20s and early 30s, I worked, hoping to save for a bachelor’s degree I would never earn. On Craigslist, I found temp jobs that didn’t require proof of legality: street fund-raiser, receptionist, assistant, office manager. The city’s buoying energy saved me in those years. I convinced myself that hiding and surviving was enough, that I didn’t need papers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Europe Races to Repair a Split Between the U.S. and Ukraine

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      European leaders raced on Sunday to salvage Ukraine’s relationship with the United States, after a bitter rupture last week between President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump. They pledged to assemble a European “coalition of the willing” to develop a plan for ending Ukraine’s war with Russia, which they hope could win the backing of a skeptical Mr. Trump.Gathering in London at the invitation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, the leaders vowed to bolster support for Ukraine. But they also expressed hope that Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump could repair their breach, underscoring Europe’s reluctance to cast off a trans-Atlantic alliance that has kept the peace for 80 years.“We have to bridge this,” Mr. Starmer said on Sunday to the BBC before the leaders began arriving at Lancaster House, near Buckingham Palace. “We have to find a way where we can all work together.”Mr. Starmer said he believed that despite Mr. Trump’s anger toward Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday, the president was committed to a lasting peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. He said Britain and France, working with other European countries, would develop their own plan with Mr. Zelensky.Details of the plan were sketchy, but Mr. Starmer suggested that the Europeans could use it as a basis to persuade Mr. Trump to commit to American security guarantees. Britain and France have already pledged to contribute troops to a peacekeeping force and are trying to enlist other countries across Europe.“I think we’ve got a step in the right direction,” Mr. Starmer said, though he added that “this is a moment of real fragility in Europe.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      BAFTA Awards Winners: ‘Conclave,’ ‘Anora’ and ‘The Brutalist’ Take Home Top Prizes

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      “Anora” and “The Brutalist” also took home major prizes at the British equivalent of the Oscars, tipping the scales again.“Conclave” won the best movie title at the EE British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday — adding the latest twist to a chaotic awards season in which no one movie has dominated the major ceremonies.The film, which stars Ralph Fiennes and was directed by Edward Berger, is a thriller about the selection of a new pope. It took home four awards on Sunday at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, commonly known as the BAFTAs. The other three prizes were in minor categories: best editing, best adapted screenplay and outstanding British film.In securing the best film award, “Conclave” beat Sean Baker’s “Anora,” a dramedy in which an exotic dancer marries the son of a Russian oligarch, and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” about a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) rebuilding his life in the United States after the Holocaust.It also triumphed over the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and “Emilia Pérez.”“Conclave” hadn’t previously featured among the major winners this awards season. It only secured one Golden Globe, for best screenplay, at a ceremony in which “Emilia Pérez” and “The Brutalist” were the big winners. More recently, the momentum for the best picture Oscar had swung to “Anora,” after that movie picked up major honors at this year’s Critic’s Choice ceremony and the Directors Guild of America and Producers Guild of America awards.Yet the prominence of “Conclave” at the BAFTAs will give the movie momentum going into this year’s Academy Awards, scheduled for March 2. There is significant overlap between the voting bodies for both awards, and the BAFTAs and Oscars regularly have the same winners.The cast and crew of “Conclave” looked stunned when the best film prize was announced. Isabella Rossellini, who plays a nun in the movie, stood onstage smiling gleefully throughout Berger’s acceptance speech, in which he said he was “deeply humbled” to see his film receive the honor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rihanna Steals the Fashion Awards

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      And a dozen other looks that made news at Britain’s Met Gala of style.She wasn’t even nominated, and Rihanna still stole the show Monday night at the Fashion Awards in London.Arriving last, as has become her wont at events like the Met Gala and the Alaïa show, and there as a plus-one to support her partner, ASAP Rocky, who received the Cultural Innovator award, the artist and Fenty mogul made her entrance in a turquoise wrap coat and faux fur hat from Christian Lacroix’s fall 2002 couture collection. With that she wore a black corset, black leather opera gloves and sheer black tights. The effect was kind of haute Flintstone meets the Folies Bergère.As for ASAP Rocky, he wore Bottega Veneta — a navy chore coat, matching pants and a red leather tie — and called the honor “surreal.” That was also an accurate description of the Royal Albert Hall, where the awards were held and where a crimson disco ball cast a new light on a familiar scene. But it was Rihanna’s enormous hat, jauntily tilted and visible from every vantage point, that summed up the point of the night: The business of fashion may be serious, but wearing it should be fun.Her look was as laudable as the actual winners, who included Alex Consani as model of the year, the first trans woman to receive the recognition; Grace Wales Bonner as British men’s wear designer of the year; Simone Rocha as British women’s wear designer; and Jonathan Anderson of Loewe and JW Anderson as designer of the year for the second year in a row.That choice wasn’t a big surprise, especially given Mr. Anderson’s moonlighting this year as the costume designer on the Luca Guadagnino films “Queer” and “Challengers” and the multiple wild rumors surrounding his future job prospects, but some of the other outfits were. Here’s what else caught our eye.More Method DressingNicola Coughlan of “Bridgerton” wore a Gaurav Gupta gown.Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesAnd Simone Ashley wore Prada.Scott A Garfitt/Invision, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Rent: 4-Bedroom London House. The Owner? Prime Minister Keir Starmer

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      Keir Starmer has rented out his home in north London since moving to Downing Street, according to newly published official records.For rent: a four-bedroom home within easy reach of the shops, restaurants and bars of fashionable north London. It might be a good idea to look after the place, however. The owner is Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer.After winning the general election in July, Mr. Starmer moved with his family into perhaps the nation’s most famous address, 10 Downing Street, freeing up the house in which he had lived for about two decades.According to official records released this week, his home has now been leased, as has a south London house owned by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, who has also moved into her official residence, 11 Downing Street.They are not the first senior British politicians presented with the dilemma of what to do with their properties when coming into power. Both the prime minister and the chancellor are given the use of a London home as well as a palatial country house for weekends.In 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair was elected prime minister, he was advised against staying in his north London house for security reasons. But he was also warned against renting it out because of potential political embarrassment.That was because of a scandal that arose several years earlier when a previous chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, unknowingly rented his west London apartment to a tenant who, tabloid newspapers gleefully discovered, worked as a sex therapist under the name “Miss Whiplash.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In London, a Pro-Palestinian Protest Disrupts the Launch of an American Mural

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      The U.S. ambassador Jane Hartley was en route to the dedication of a climate-themed mural in London by Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama ‘Hope’ poster. But then a protest began.It’s the kind of cultural exchange any diplomat would savor: A prominent American street artist paints a mural, dedicated to the cause of climate activism, on an apartment building in one of London’s hippest neighborhoods.Jane D. Hartley, the United States ambassador to Britain, who proposed the idea to the artist Shepard Fairey, has a track record in these projects. When she was ambassador to Paris from 2014 to 2017, she asked another well-known American artist, Jeff Koons, to create a sculpture to honor victims of terrorist attacks there.But when Ms. Hartley was on her way to the dedication ceremony for this latest project on Monday morning, she got word that a small band of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had gathered in the Shoreditch neighborhood, beneath the red-and-blue mural, which rises four floors above the street.They began chanting anti-American slogans and unfurling banners calling for justice for the Palestinians in Gaza — a message that seemed even more fraught than usual, given the timing on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.It was another example of how the Israel-Gaza conflict has reverberated around the world, fueling protests, large and small, on college campuses, city squares,and in this case, in a normally tranquil neighborhood.Ms. Hartley’s security team diverted her car, while Mr. Fairey, who was on hand to greet her, hurriedly relocated with embassy staff members to a nearby café. He seemed bemused by the disruption, noting that much of his work has a protest element, even if his patron on this project was a government official.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More