This year's Cannes Film Festival is at its halfway mark, but it's been an attention-grabbing affair since its start — from new rules for its red carpets, nerves about potential U.S. tariffs and the return of Tom Cruise.

And that says nothing about the films, seen as a strong slate as Cannes has become increasingly important to the Oscars' best picture hopefuls. As the festival enters its second week, it's become clear that this year's films are reckoning with geopolitical doom, climate change and other calamities that closely resemble current events.

The Chelsea Flower Show bloomed with royals, celebrities and a pup or two at the gardening showcase highlight resilient landscapes and natural planting.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla toured the show Monday before it opens to regular visitors. The king is a patron of the Royal Horticultural Society, which puts on the annual event in London.

Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen was forced into a draw Monday by more than 143,000 people worldwide playing against him in a single, record-setting game.

Billed as "Magnus Carlsen vs. The World," the online match began April 4 on Chess.com, the world's largest chess website, and was the first-ever online freestyle game to feature a world champion.

Denzel Washington sandwiched a whirlwind trip to the Cannes Film Festival, in between Broadway performances, for the premiere of Spike Lee's "Highest 2 Lowest" on Monday — and was rewarded with a surprise: an honorary Palme d'Or.

Cannes had flipped around some of its scheduling to accommodate Washington's speedy France trip, which came on his lone off-day while performing "Othello" in New York. Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux surprised Washington with the award before the Monday night premiere.

Last year, the Cannes Film Festival produced three best actress nominees at the Oscars. This year's edition may have just supplied another.

In Lynne Ramsay's "Die, My Love," Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play a married couple with a newborn who move into an old country house. In Ramsay's messy and moving marital psychodrama, Lawrence plays an increasingly unhinged young mother named Grace whose postpartum depression reaches darkly hallucinatory extremes.

"Is this what the end of the world feels like?"

So asks a character in one of the most-talked about films of the 78th Cannes Film Festival: Oliver Laxe's "Sirât" a Moroccan desert road trip through, we come to learn, a World War III purgatory.

Cannes is a short trip from Bono's seaside villa in Eze-sur-Mer. He bought it with The Edge in 1993, and considers himself grateful to a coastline that, he says, gave him a "delayed adolescence."

"I can tell you I've slept on beaches close to here," Bono says with a grin. "I've woken up in the sun."

Police in Slovenia are investigating the disappearance of a bronze statue of U.S. first lady Melania Trump that was sawed off and carried away from her hometown.

The life-size sculpture was unveiled in 2020 during President Donald Trump's first term in office near Sevnica in central Slovenia, where Melanija Knavs was born in 1970. It replaced a wooden statue that had been set on fire earlier that year.

Most contestants at the Eurovision Song Contest are seeking as much publicity as possible.

Israel's Yuval Raphael is keeping a low profile.

Sepideh Farsi is still in shock after an Israeli air strike in Gaza killed her documentary's main subject, 25-year-old photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, weeks before its Cannes premiere Thursday.

"Why would you kill someone and decimate an entire family just because she was taking photos?" she told AFP before the screening.