Names and faces
Matt Damon has described living in Ireland during the country’s coronavirus lockdown as like being in a “fairy tale” during a surprise radio interview. The Hollywood star and his family were in Dublin, where he had been filming Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel before travel restrictions were imposed worldwide. The family has been staying in the affluent Dalkey suburb, where celebrities including Bono have homes since filming was shut down. Local residents have spotted the actor out and about, and local radio station SPIN 1038 tried for weeks to track him down and get him to come on air. In an interview Wednesday, Damon also revealed that his eldest daughter Alexia was diagnosed with covid-19 while at college in New York, but she “got through it fine.” “Obviously what’s going on in the world is horrible, but I’m with my whole family, I’ve got my kids,” he told SPIN 1038. “Even in the lockdown, they’re like, ‘you got to stay within two kilometers of your house.’ Two kilometers here, there’s trees and forests and woods and ocean and I can’t think of any place you’d rather want to be in a two-kilometer radius of,” he said. “It feels a bit, you know, like a fairy tale here.” Damon also praised Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who is a qualified medical doctor, for working at hospitals one day a week. “I mean, what a badass. That’s just on another level,” he said.
When the Russian rap star Timati took issue last week with the White House’s description of how World War II ended, he called on his fans to set the record straight. Since then, a torrent of Russian language comments has flooded the White House’s official Instagram page, proudly pointing out the Soviet Union’s role in the allied victory. On May 8, the White House posted a video on Instagram commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe with a caption celebrating that “America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis.” Timati, whose full name is Timur Yunusov, commented on the video with a reminder, in Russian, of the country’s role in defeating the Nazis — a fact that is “core to the Russian identity,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at the firm Graphika Inc., which studies social media. Timati also wrote an Instagram post to his 15.5 million followers with an image of the White House post and a caption suggesting they “go to the White House page and leave our thoughts in the comments.”