Wicked

US Treasury accuses Pyongyang of stealing $3bn in digital assets to finance its nuclear weapons programme over three years.

North Korea has denounced the latest United States sanctions targeting cybercrimes that the US says help finance its nuclear weapons programme, accusing Washington of harbouring “wicked” hostility towards Pyongyang and promising unspecified countermeasures.

The statement on Thursday by a North Korean vice foreign minister came two days after the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on eight people and two firms, including North Korean bankers, for allegedly laundering money from cybercrime schemes.

The US Treasury accused North Korea of operating state-sponsored hacking schemes that have stolen more than $3bn in mostly digital assets over the past three years, an amount unmatched by any other foreign actor. The Treasury Department said the illicit funds helped finance the country’s nuclear weapons programme.

The department said North Korea relies on a network of banking representatives, financial institutions and shell companies in North Korea, China, Russia and elsewhere to launder funds obtained through IT worker fraud, cryptocurrency heists and sanctions evasion.

The sanctions were rolled out even as US President Donald Trump continues to express interest in reviving talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Their nuclear discussions during Trump’s first term collapsed in 2019 amid disagreements over trading relief from US-led sanctions on North Korea for steps to dismantle its nuclear programme.

“Now that the present US administration has clarified its stand to be hostile towards the DPRK to the last, we will also take proper measures to counter it with patience for any length of time,” the North Korean vice minister, Kim Un Chol, said in a statement.

He said US sanctions and pressure tactics will never change the “present strategic situation” between the countries or alter North Korea’s “thinking and viewpoint”.

Kim Jong Un has shunned any form of talks with Washington and Seoul since his fallout with Trump in 2019. He has since made Russia the focus of his foreign policy, sending thousands of soldiers, many of whom have died on the battlefield, and large amounts of military equipment for President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine while pursuing an increasingly assertive strategy aimed at securing a larger role for North Korea in a united front against the US-led West.

In a recent speech, Kim Jong Un urged Washington to drop its demand for the North to surrender its nuclear weapons as a condition for resuming diplomacy. He ignored Trump’s proposal to meet while the US president was in South Korea last week for meetings with world leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

“What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” a theater critic for the Daily Telegraph lamented after the London premiere of “Hedda Gabler” in 1891. Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen’s fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.

But writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman,” “The Marvels”) and her star Tessa Thompson understand Hedda down to the pretty poison in her molecules. Their rollicking redo, set from dusk to hangover at a drunken bacchanal, is vibrant and viciously alive. With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Thompson’s Hedda is a clever, status-conscious snot raised to believe that her sole purpose is to be a rich man’s wife. With no hobbies or career and no interest in motherhood, her only creative outlets are squandering money and machinating the success of her milquetoast husband, middlebrow academic George (Tom Bateman), who has such a flimsy hold on his bride that his last name might as well be attached to hers with Scotch tape. (It’s Tesman and it’s pointedly rarely used.) Hedda doesn’t love George. In fact, she seems to think he’s a whiny little worm. But she’s dead-set on securing him a promotion to afford her expensive tastes.

If Hedda had been born a man, she’d be leading armies into battle like her late father, General Gabler, who spawned her out of wedlock. Instead, she takes out her aggression on civilians. Using her charm offensive, Hedda goads naive spouses to cheat, recovering alcoholics to drink and depressives to wander off into the darkness with a revolver. Some of her havoc is calculated, most of it is out of pique that others are living braver, more fulfilling lives. All of it feels like a cat tipping over water glasses just to see them shatter. Like the nasty seductress of “Dangerous Liaisons,” she’s a warning that frustrated women aren’t merely a hazard to themselves — they’re a menace to the society that made them.

Inspired by her antihero, DaCosta manipulates Ibsen to suit her own goals. She’s updated the play’s setting to 1950s England, a similar-in-spirit era in which well-bred women were kept domesticated. (I can’t wait for someone to do a version among the tradwives of Utah.) From there, DaCosta has smartly tightened the narrative, which used to have a key scene at an off-stage bachelor party to which Hedda was pointedly not invited. “What a pity the fair lady can’t be there, invisible,” Ibsen’s Hedda grumbled at being left home while the men got to carouse.

In DaCosta’s version, the whole drama unfolds during a martini and cocaine-fueled rager at Hedda’s mansion, a party she’s throwing to impress George’s potential new boss, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), who she hears has a bohemian streak. At her own happening on her own turf, Hedda couldn’t be more visibly in command. She rallies the guests to hurl her former classmate, Thea (Imogen Poots), a wretchedly earnest drip, into a nearby lake and gets the whole room grooving to a dance band’s cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet,” the swinging hit that the Icelandic pop singer Björk would popularize a half-century later. It’s a great song pick with manic crescendos — You blow a fuse, zing boom! The devil cuts loose, zing boom! — that capture Hedda’s feverish mood shifts.

We know this evening will go wrong from the film’s opening shot of Hedda facing down two policemen who keep interrupting her explanation of the last 24 hours. “Where should I start?” she says with smothered exasperation. As we cut back to watch the night unfold, a shot of Hedda surveying the crowd from an upstairs landing feels like she’s looking at a game board — Clue, perhaps? — with a weapon stashed in every room. Which threat is most pressing? The pistols she keeps in a leather box, the precarious crystal chandelier or the lake’s deep waters outside?

Thompson is marvelous in the role. Even the way she chomps a cherry off a cocktail toothpick has menace. I first saw her as the lead in “Romeo and Juliet” at a 99-seat theater in Pasadena when she was barely 20 years old (there’s so much talent in our small stage scene), so it’s a nice reminder that the funny and soulful actor of the “Thor” and “Creed” franchises is also a hell of a good classical performer and a worthy star on her own.

She wears Hedda’s lovely mask with confidence — red lips, lush cheekbones, cool demeanor — and periodically allows it to slip. Editor Jacob Schulsinger often allows Hedda a tiny hesitation before she charges ahead ruining people’s lives, long enough to know that she’s considering the consequences. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, I just do things all of a sudden on a whim,” she admits to the nosy Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), revealing a sliver of weakness. She’s almost (nearly) asking for help. Yet, the judge just wants to maneuver her into bed. How tedious.

DaCosta boldly layers race and sexuality on top of Ibsen’s tale. She’s gender-swapped Hedda’s ex-lover, Eilert, into a lesbian named Eileen (a swaggering Nina Hoss), a brilliant, openly norm-defying author who is George’s job-seeking competition (and the only person Hedda enjoys kissing). If earlier incarnations of Hedda didn’t dare defy social rules when she was white and straight, being Black and queer adds so much additional peril that the script barely needs to say out loud. The new tension is there in just a few whispers, as when Hedda overhears a guest murmur that their hostess is “duskier than I thought she would be.” Hedda doesn’t acknowledge the slight. That would mean admitting vulnerability. She simply starts destroying the speaker in the very next scene.

What’s wiser? Eileen’s determination to face down the boys and be accepted for her full self or Hedda sneaking around and steering everyone’s fates behind the scenes? They can’t team up — they’re doomed to tear each other to shreds. And as much glee as we get watching Hedda’s rampage, it aches to see these two formidable women reduce each other to hysterics (to use the medical diagnosis of the day).

From our 21st century perspective, they both have a right to be mad and they both might be mentally ill. DaCosta doesn’t offer a verdict, but she plunges us so deeply into Hedda’s headspace that we can hear how certain things set her off. Insults hit her with a knife-like hiss of air; fresh schemes get her charging around to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s tumultuous, percussive score.

Costume designer Lindsay Pugh has done incredible work outfitting the film’s central female roles. Hedda wears bullet-like strands of pearls that choke her neck and a jade-colored gown that seems to molder into a festering, jealous shade of green. When her rival, Poot’s Thea, arrives underdressed, Hedda forces her into a hideous frock with fussy bows and an ungainly skirt. Poots, her nose raw and red, her character kicked when she’s down, gamely looks a fright, trusting that moral fiber will expose Hedda’s ugly insecurities.

But Pugh’s stroke of genius is putting Eileen not in some sort of mannish suit but in a bombshell dress that highlights her curves like a primal goddess. It’s pure feminine power — just like the film itself — and when Eileen struts into a room of her all-male colleagues, that dress exposes how fast the tenor can shift from awe to jeers and how little wiggle room she or any woman has for error.

Who knows if Kendrick Lamar will sit for a formal deposition in Drake’s ongoing defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, after Lamar flambéed him on “Not Like Us.” But at SoFi Stadium on Wednesday, Lamar and his co-headliner SZA had a great recurring bit imagining what might happen.

In a fake video montage played between set changeovers, Lamar responded to mock-questioning like, “When you said you want the party to die, was that a metaphor or are you serious?” and “Don’t you think disappearing is a form of attention-seeking?” by blowing him off and phoning in a big order of takeout. SZA then lighted up an enormous joint in the lawyer’s office.

The pair’s Grand National Tour is a triumph of the unbothered. Wednesday’s set — the first of a three-night SoFi stand — was a bountiful, meticulous three-hour show that centered on the camaraderie between two of the most important acts in contemporary music. They had a wicked sense of humor about the performance too. At one point, SZA seduced a giant, slicked-up praying mantis dancer. If only we all had the same leeway when deposed.

Lamar, coming off a pair of Grammy wins for “Not Like Us” and a gleefully petty Super Bowl halftime show, is at perhaps the peak of his career. So it’s worth noting how inspiringly egalitarian this hometown show was — a hierarchy-free split with former TDE labelmate SZA, often fully meshing their sets together for their on-record collaborations. The format brought new energy and understanding into their catalogs, all while the pair gassed each other up as virtuoso live performers.

Kendrick Lamar and SZA at the 2016 Grammys.

(Lester Cohen / WireImage)

On Wednesday, SZA arguably made the most of the stadium-sized opportunity. SZA is a powerhouse vocalist and musical omnivore with a stoner’s comic timing (most recently seen in the charming comedy film “One of Them Days”). But she’s now honed her stagecraft to be on par with any pop royalty. Between “Snooze” and “Crybaby,” she was lifted on wires, revealing a gauze train in the shape of a chrysalis, to spellbinding effect. It took some real mettle to then perform her ballad “Nobody Gets Me” midair.

A surprise cameo from Lizzo paid alms to their long friendship, and a bawdy slice of her verse from Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” proved she can own even a nemesis’ material with her charisma. When she spun “Garden (Say It Like Dat)” into “Kitchen,” the dancers’ delightfully goopy, insectoid costumes and monolithic ant sculpture felt like H.R. Giger taking mushrooms on a warm afternoon in Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.

When she and Lamar shared the stage, as on the Oscar-nominated “All the Stars,” “30 for 30” and their respective solo cuts “Doves in the Wind” and “LOVE.,” there was an alchemy between two superfans, their physical presence across the diamond-shaped catwalks reinvigorating this long-beloved music.

At this point, Lamar’s case for being the best rapper alive is fully closed. Of course he is. Even if you thought the title was a little wobbly after the knotty, skeptical “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the acid-bath of “Not Like Us” and the L.A-embodying surprise release “GNX” slammed the debate shut as it spun off hit after hit. Who else could make a pitch-perfect indictment of the current American political climate onstage at the Super Bowl halftime show, while needling his most loathed enemy and spinning off memes with just a quick grin in bootcut jeans?

At SoFi, a few miles from his old Compton backyard, he drew from that monumental catalog and recontextualized it for this club-ready, venom-streaked era. The show’s format covered more than 50 songs between the two artists, so even when he only got to a verse or two, there was always something new or bracing. Here, “m.A.A.d. city,” one of his hardest and cruelest street cuts, became a meta-R&B number that made the song even more eerie. On “Humble.,” he was flanked by female dancers posing in vicious geometric forms, physically embodying the ego-check of the song’s chorus.

The Drake flame-war material was delicious fun, from the shots-fired kickoff verse on “Like That” to the relentless, merciless taunts on “Euphoria.” But the “GNX” segments, like the Tupac-conjuring “reincarnated” and the ice-cold “peekaboo” (and, obviously, the great Mustard-y howl of “tv off”) made the case for how this album will continue to reveal new textures and resonate in L.A. lore. There wasn’t room for a five-times-reprised “Not Like Us” like at his history-making 2024 “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends” set. But when he did play it, it was less about his archenemy than about L.A., a city with a new song in the canon, a definitive “Us” who were all alike in screaming it.

It felt poignant that Lamar and SZA reunited again for the set’s closers, the unexpectedly relentless Hot 100 fixture “luther” (now at 13 weeks at No. 1) and “gloria,” Lamar’s bait-and-switch about his complicated relationship to his own writing process. With SZA as his Greek chorus, he ended the night on a note about how all this relentless work was worth it to arrive at real self-understanding. An ally that will never fail, no matter who out there is deposing you.