There was more business than usual and some bemused regulars after El Califa de León was rewarded for its ‘exceptional’ offering

El Califa de León, an unassuming taco joint in Mexico City, measures just 3 metres by 3 metres and has space for only about six people to stand at a squeeze. Locals usually wait for 5 minutes between ordering and picking up their food.

All that changed on Wednesday, however, when it became the first Mexican taco stand ever to win a Michelin star, putting it in the exalted company of fine dining restaurants around the world, and drawing crowds like it has never seen.

News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible

The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.

“Water spinach looks at water spinach. Turns out that water spinach isn’t just a name,” says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsai being “Hollow Tsai” – a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach.

The attempted assassination of a leader sympathetic to Putin has Europe on edge. But exaggerating the fascist threat is also dangerous

The shooting of the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has dramatised the increasingly angry and polarised landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections , it is time to step back from the brink.

This eruption of violence in the midst of the campaign is so shocking that it may, at best, have a chastening effect, softening the venomous tone of political discourse by reminding democracies old and new of what they stand to lose.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

Boxer has raised funds for Ukraine but faced criticism in the past for his apparent Moscow-leaning sympathies

On the streets of Kyiv this week, the name of the Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Oleksandr Usyk prompted a few eye-rolls, alongside expressions of admiration for his sporting prowess.

The former cruiserweight, who fights the Briton Tyson Fury for the undisputed heavyweight championship in Saudi Arabia on Saturday night, has been an active fundraiser for the Ukrainian military and humanitarian causes since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. His success in the ring is a matter of considerable national pride.

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.

Supporters gather enough valid signatures to put measure – that would enshrine abortion rights into constitution – on to ballot

Voters in Colorado will have a say on abortion rights this fall after supporters collected enough valid signatures to put a measure on the ballot, part of a national push to pose abortion rights questions to voters since the US supreme court removed the nationwide right to abortion.

The Colorado measure officially made the ballot on Friday and would enshrine abortion rights into the constitution in a state which already allows abortion at all stages of pregnancy despite the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade .

Cannes film festival
A dying director who fled from the US to Canada agrees to make a confessional film in Schrader’s fragmented and anticlimactic story

Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment. It is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks (Schrader also adapted Banks’s novel Affliction in 1997) and reunites Schrader with Richard Gere, his star from American Gigolo. Though initially intriguing, it really fails to deliver the emotional revelation or self-knowledge that it appears to be leading up to. There are moments of intensity and promise; with a director of Schrader’s shrewdness and creative alertness, how could there not be? But the movie appears to circle endlessly around its own emotions and ideas without closing in.

The title is partly a reference to the national anthem of that nation, which is a place of freedom and opportunity which may have an almost Rosebud-type significance for the chief character, an avowed draft-resister refugee from the US in the late 60s, who becomes an acclaimed documentary film-maker in his chosen country. Maybe Vietnam was his real reason for fleeing and maybe it wasn’t. This central point is one of many things in this fragmented film which is unsatisfyingly evoked.

Samantha Power says barely 100 trucks of aid a day enter Gaza, far less than 600 needed to address threat of famine

Humanitarian assistance has begun to arrive in Gaza along a US-made pier , but the US aid chief said the new sea corridor could not be a substitute for land crossings, and warned that deliveries of food and fuel entering Gaza had slowed to “dangerously low levels”.

The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, confirmed on Friday that truckloads of humanitarian aid, including food from the United Arab Emirates, sent by ship from Cyprus, had been unloaded on the Gaza coast and handed over to the control of the UN.

Yonaguni is a tourist hotspot – but its location just 100km from Taiwan means residents must wrestle with the creeping militarisation of their home

In the minds of many Japanese people, Yonaguni is a sleepy paradise of crystal-clear sea and pristine beaches, where miniature horses graze on clifftops and empty roads dissect fields of sugar cane; where tourists dive with hammerhead sharks and marvel at the Ayamihabiru – the world’s largest Atlas moth.

But this tiny island, located far closer to Taipei than Tokyo, now finds itself at the centre of regional tensions triggered by a new round of Chinese aggression towards Taiwan .