Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars show has repeatedly felt like it was ripped from today’s headlines – but Mon Mothma’s radical speech was written two years ago * Warning: this contains spoilers for episode nine of Andor season two Since it started in 2022, the Star Wars spin-off Andor has proved an unexpectedly bolshie addition to the Disney-owned mega-franchise. By portraying worker uprisings, surveillance states, sexual violence and prison industrial complexes, showrunner Tony Gilroy added fresh political nuance and human stakes to George Lucas’s endless galactic civil war. And since its April premiere, the show’s second and final season has only doubled down. In the first episode, viewers saw smarmy spin doctors from the Empire’s “Ministry of Enlightenment” discuss how to “weaponise” galactic opinion to manufacture public approval for ethnic cleansing on the planet Ghorman. News anchors parrot Imperial talking points, while the military plots a long game: to provoke an uprising from “rebels you can depend on to do the wrong thing” to justify a mass crackdown – all in service of a long-planned land and resources grab. Continue reading...

More than 46,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war, according to Palestinian health officials