First there was a moment of stunned silence. Then, in the Sala Grande, the main screening hall of the Venice film festival within the Palazzo del Cinema, the audience stood almost as one and turned to applaud the film-makers for 25 minutes.

The film the audience had watched for 80 harrowing minutes was the Gaza documentary NAZA, which has been produced by the Guardian.

The film’s title comes from an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to the civilians expected to be killed in a military attack.

More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public intellectual Manos Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested, comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance, the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief from judgment, conviction from action.”

Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, the Guardian has learned.

As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda.

When Jon Rosenthal announced his campaign last fall for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, he never expected to talk about the short-lived Republic of Rhodesia.

Rosenthal, a 63-year-old mechanical engineer and Democratic state representative from northwest Houston, is the kind of politician you might expect to show interest in the influential but little-understood three-member board that, despite its antiquated name, regulates the oil and gas industry. He is an earnest, bald father of two—the kind of guy who uses phrases like “subsea production” and “deep-water intervention systems” in casual conversation. The Republican chair, he believed, was too cozy with the industry, and Rosenthal prepared a pragmatic slate of ideas to weatherize natural gas networks and clean up abandoned wells. It was shaping up as an important but low-profile race.