Category Archives: Culture

True crime novel about 1949 murder of Paris life model wins France’s biggest literary prize

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Philippe Jaenada wins Prix Goncourt with novel that seeks to solve 77-year-old case and rehabilitates reputation of its victim

A literary true-crime investigation that tries to solve a 77-year-old cold case and ends up rehabilitating the reputation of its life model victim has won France’s most prestigious literary prize.

The author Philippe Jaenada was announced on Tuesday afternoon as the winner of the Prix Goncourt, for his book L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), a recreation of the murder of a 29-year-old Breton woman named Louise Cansot.

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Teenage violinist wins BBC Young Musician 2026, after first all-female final

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Judges hail Sofia Demetriades’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as full of insights, poetry and maturity

A teenage violinist has won the BBC Young Musician competition 2026, in the first all-female final in the competition’s 48-year history.

The judges, Joanna MacGregor, Ben Gernon and Errollyn Wallen, hailed Sofia Demetriades’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as full of insights, poetry and maturity.

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Disquiet grows in Albanese’s back yard as Grayndler artists unite against ‘insane’ AI proposal

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Inner west Sydney seat has long been safely held by the PM – but potential changes to copyright laws are angering its large creative community

The prime minister is facing growing discontent within his own electorate as creatives push back against the federal government’s proposal to allow AI companies to scrape everything Australians create online.

Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner west is home to more than 3,000 cultural and creative businesses, and 10% of its workers are employed in cultural and creative fields – compared with 4.2% nationally.

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Patrick Stewart, Star Trek actor and acclaimed thespian, dies aged 86

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Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men actor died at his home after ‘a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia’

Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British stage and screen actor renowned for both Shakespeare and sci-fi, has died. He was 86.

The Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men star died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia”, said Kelly Bush Novak, his longtime spokesperson, to the Hollywood Reporter.

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Cuts like a knife: Canadian rocker Bryan Adams trolls Trump with new song

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Musician wrote a ‘love letter’ to Canada with a new album – and some pointed commentary about the US president

Lake Ontario, the vast body of water that straddles the US-Canada border, has gone by many names over the centuries: Lac Saint-Louis, Lacus Ontarius, Skaniadorio, Cataraqui Lake. But one thing it will never be called, says the Canadian rock star Bryan Adams, is Lake America.

In his new song Lake Ontario, Adams takes aim at the US president, Donald Trump, accusing him of “breaking the peace” between the people who live on the lake’s shores.

The ‘lake of shining waters’ is what the Iroquois called her

It’s a First Nations name – not an executive order.

But things weren’t going his way in Iran

So like a baby tossing the toys from the pram

You can push us to the brink

But where the open road divides

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Elke Sommer, prolific German star of A Shot in the Dark and And Then There Were None, dies aged 85

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The Berlin-born performer had a gift for languages that took her to Hollywood, landing roles alongside Peter Sellers, Dick Van Dyke and Paul Newman

Elke Sommer, the prolific German star of the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, early 70s Agatha Christie adaptation And Then there Were None, and British sex comedy Carry on Behind, has died aged 85. Bild magazine reported that Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure.

German-born Sommer, whose best-known film roles were in the 1960s and 70s, was one of the wave of European performers who crossed over to Hollywood and English-language cinema with considerable success, following the postwar emergence of European new wave cinema. Sommer was one of the few German actors to make waves at the time, as Hollywood made much of her bombshell image.

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Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi given new prison sentence

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Charges against him are unclear after return to Iran despite being sentenced last year for ‘propaganda activities’

An Iranian court has handed the award-winning film director Jafar Panahi a new prison sentence of five years and one month and ordered the seizure of all his assets.

The 66-year-old, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year for It Was Just an Accident, was sentenced in absentia, his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told the Iranian news outlet Emtedad. The court also imposed a two-year travel ban and barred him from using social media for two years, Nili said.

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Gulliver fans celebrate three centuries of Jonathan Swift’s classic satire

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Events in Ireland explore origins of Gulliver’s Travels, the Dublin clergyman’s book that became an instant hit in 1726

In March 1726, an Irish clergyman visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver a manuscript to a publisher under cover of night. The dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted to publish it anonymously.

His name was Jonathan Swift and the story was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The satirical work was published that October and is better known 300 years on as Gulliver’s Travels.

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Chris Brown given suspended sentence over bottle attack at London club

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R&B singer sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment suspended for 12 months over incident in Mayfair in 2023

The R&B singer Chris Brown has been given a suspended sentence after striking a man twice in the head with a tequila bottle in a central London club.

Brown, 37, admitted affray earlier this year after attacking a former friend with a “heavy” tequila bottle on the dancefloor at the Tape private members’ club in Mayfair in February 2023.

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Trump rallies for Mike Rogers – and Nicki Minaj’s derriere – in Michigan

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Trump again congratulated Ohio senator’s rear end before his cheeky comment about rapper being ‘hard to miss’

Donald Trump reiterated his apparent love for buxom bums during a rally in Michigan on Sunday where he encouraged the crowd to compliment rapper Nicki Minaj’s behind.

Trump’s cheeky comments about Minaj’s derriere came as he explained his recent observation on the Republican Ohio senator Jon Husted’s rear end. Earlier in October, Trump said of the former college football player: “I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body, because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass and I looked at the whole – and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws.

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‘He’s not going to punk me. I’ll trick him’: Ali G: Who Iz I? stooge says he was in on joke but didn’t tell Sacha Baron Cohen

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Exclusive: Joshua Loudermilk says suspicions first raised during filming by gun shaped like wearable plastic bottom: ‘You’re gonna put a butt on top of a butt? You can’t run in that’

• This article contains spoilers for Ali G: Who Iz I?

Joshua Loudermilk, one of two men apparently discredited by the new Ali G movie Ali G: Who Iz I?, has said that he was in on the joke, but that the film-makers didn’t realise this.

Loudermilk, a 54-year-old aspiring actor from North Carolina, has told the Guardian he recognised star Sacha Baron Cohen early in the shoot but continued pretending to be a hard-right Maga sympathiser prepared to defend the US border at all costs.

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Dónal Lunny, ‘colossus of Irish music’, dies aged 79

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Founding member of Planxty, Lunny went on to play for bands such as Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band and Coolfin

The Irish traditional musician Dónal Lunny has died at the age of 79 from cancer.

Lunny rose to prominence in the trio Rakes of Kildare alongside his brother Frank and Christy Moore. He went on to play in bands such as Planxty, Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band and Coolfin among others and toured the world.

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Blue Planet III features cloudier footage to prove authenticity amid AI boom

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BBC series deliberately uses ‘more organic’ shots to assure viewers animals are not AI-generated, producers say

The David Attenborough-narrated series Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footage to counter AI fakery and assure viewers it is “authentic”, its producers have said.

Nearly a decade after Blue Planet II shone a light on plastic pollution, and 25 years since the first Blue Planet aired, the hit BBC series is returning with more animal behaviour and cutting-edge technology, including the world’s first underwater CCTV camera – dubbed “stonefish” cam.

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Blackpool, Sheffield, Milton Keynes and Wrexham shortlisted for UK city of culture 2029

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Each place, selected from longlist of nine, will be given £125,000 to develop bids before winner is announced in new year

Blackpool, Sheffield, Milton Keynes and Wrexham have been shortlisted to be the UK city of culture 2029, an award viewed as a way to boost local economies, foster civic pride and, above all, have some fun.

The four places were chosen from a longlist of nine and each will be given £125,000 to develop their bids before the winner is announced in the new year.

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Taiwan charges five men over plot to run over comedian for his Xi Jinping jokes

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Person named ‘K’ from China paid five defendants to injure Huang Yi-hao, New Taipei prosecutors say

Taiwanese prosecutors have charged five men over a plot to ram a car into a comedian who made fun of the Chinese Communist party and Xi Jinping.

Taiwan has repeatedly accused China of transnational repression to silence critics on the self-governed island, which Beijing claims as its territory and has vowed to take by force if necessary.

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Fifth foreign firm pulls out of controversial Israeli cable car project to East Jerusalem

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Rights groups say the planned 1.4km route, which ends at compound run by far-right settler group Elad, will displace Palestinians and reshape the cultural landscape

A fifth foreign company has pulled out of a plan to build a cable car from West to East Jerusalem that threatens to involve the seizure of land and property rights from dozens of Palestinian families along its route, but local authorities insist the scheme is proceeding as planned.

The project appeared to have stalled for four years until late September, just weeks before Israel’s 27 October elections, when the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA) issued a notice of intent to award a contract without a public tender to ROPES, a cable car engineering consultancy based in South Tyrol, Italy.

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Mariah Carey wins dismissal of brother’s defamation lawsuit over her memoir

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Morgan Carey sued his sister over claims in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, which he said falsely portrayed him as a violent drug dealer

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit from Mariah Carey’s brother, five years after he accused her of defaming him in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

In the memoir, Carey described Morgan as a “sometimes drug dealing, been-in-the-system, drunk-ass brother” and called him her “ex-brother”.

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Getting Ziggy with it: David Bowie’s alter egos inspire dance show that will transform his songs

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Subject to Change: A Dance for David Bowie will explore how the musician ‘practised a form of artistic reincarnation’, says choreographer Marcos Morau

‘Let’s dance,” sang David Bowie in 1983, commanding: “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.” That call is to be answered – with footwear TBC – by an international dance production featuring new choral arrangements of songs from throughout his career.

Subject to Change: A Dance for David Bowie will be staged at Sadler’s Wells in London in autumn 2028 after a world premiere in Luxembourg. It will visit Tokyo in 2029. The show will explore how Bowie “practised a form of artistic reincarnation” according to Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau who is taking inspiration from the superstar’s transformations into personas such as Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke.

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Ellie Goulding admits error over promoting diamonds from controversial Australian mine

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Singer ‘mortified’ about wearing diamonds from Argyle mine at centre of environmental concerns about Indigenous land

The singer Ellie Goulding has admitted her error at having promoted diamonds at the centre of environmental concerns about Indigenous land in Australia, despite having spent years campaigning on environmental issues – including the effects of mining on ancestral lands.

She appeared at a event in London earlier this month for the jewellery brand Boodles, modelling some of its newly acquired pink diamonds, some of which came from a controversial mine in Western Australia.

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Three deaths from float crushes raise safety concerns over Japanese festivals

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Deputy mayor of Saijo died after becoming trapped under float, days after two similar incidents elsewhere

There is mounting concern over the safety of Japan’s traditional festivals after the death of a senior local official who was reportedly crushed beneath a float at the weekend, days after two men died in similar incidents in another part of the country.

Akihiro Nabae, the deputy mayor of Saijo, in western Japan, was carrying a giant float with other participants in a festival on Saturday when he became trapped beneath the structure, Agence France-Presse reported. Nabae, 62, was taken to hospital and later pronounced dead, local media said, adding that no one else was injured.

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