Devil

On 29 December 2019, following several days of Christmas indulgence, Gaspar Noé felt an odd sensation in his head. When the ambulance arrived, he was told he’d had a brain haemorrhage; later, the doctors said he had a 50% chance of dying, a 35% chance of surviving with brain lesions, and a 15% chance of escaping unharmed. “I thought: ‘I mustn’t die,’” he says, “‘because it’s not very nice for everyone else to have to sort out all my stuff.’ So maybe my film poster collection saved me: they might have thrown out my Fritz…

Devil House begins with a proposal from true crime author Gage Chandler’s editor: a property is for sale in the California town of Milpitas. Abandoned after a spell as a pornographic book and video shop, it subsequently became the site of a little known, possibly occult double murder. The deadly weapon was a sword, and this was 1987: the peak of the satanic panic, when devil worship was supposedly rife and lurking in the grooves of every heavy metal record. Why doesn’t Gage move in, investigate the murders and write his…

Title: India and EU : An Insider's View Author: Bhaswati Mukherjee Publisher: ICWA/Vij Books Pages: 358 Price: Rs 746 About a decade ago, the European Commission, troubled perhaps by the not-so-positive perception it has in India, decided to set up what it called a "Indo-EU news agency" to produce and disseminate real-time, accurate and informative news from the EU to India and perhaps vice versa. After a lot of endless discussions within the notorious EU bureaucracy, they chose an Indian…

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a stunning photograph of the surface of Mars, demonstrating how winds sculpt the landscape. The Hooke Crater area in the Red Planet's southern highlands is shown in this image taken from orbit by ESA and Roscosmos' ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). The artificial hues are due to filters used by TGO's CaSSIS camera, which looks at the surface mineralogy in infrared wavelength to capture more details. On Mars, where the thin atmosphere, powerful winds, and vast amounts of dust…