Renowned poet and author wins prize for series of New Yorker essays on suffering of Palestinians in Gaza
The renowned Palestinian poet and author, Mosab Abu Toha, is among this year’s Pulitzer prize winners.
Abu Toha was awarded for a series of essays in the New Yorker documenting the lives and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, where he has lived nearly all his life.
Continue reading...Song made famous by Aretha Franklin is on military band’s set list for handover of chancellery to Friedrich Merz
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is to be played out of office by a military band who will perform tunes chosen by him that are intended to sum up his mood and political life.
Scholz will bow out to the Beatles, Johann Sebastian Bach and an Otis Redding hit made famous by Aretha Franklin.
Continue reading...Two people have been arrested in connection to an alleged planned attack on Brazil’s LGBTQ community at the singer’s Sunday concert, police say
Two people have been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to detonate explosives at a free Lady Gaga concert in Rio de Janeiro, in what authorities believe was an attempt to target Brazil’s LGBTQ community.
The Rio event on Saturday was the biggest show of the pop star’s career. It attracted an estimated 2.1 million fans to Copacabana beach and had crowds screaming and dancing along.
Continue reading...President calls films ‘national security threat’ and claims he called on commerce department to immediately enact tariff
Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.
In his post, he claimed to have authorised the commerce department and the US trade representative to immediately begin instituting such a tariff.
Continue reading...Antihero reject movie starring Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan a ‘great reset’ as Alec Baldwin’s Rust falls flat
Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* opened with $76m in domestic ticket sales, according to studio estimates on Sunday, kicking off the summer box office with a solid No 1 debut that fell shy of Marvel’s more spectacular launches.
All eyes had been on whether Thunderbolts* – a team-up of antihero rejects similar to Avengers – could restore the Walt Disney Company superhero factory to the kind of box office performance the studio once enjoyed so regularly. The results – similar to the debuts of Eternals ($71m) and Ant-Man and the Wasp ($75m) – suggested Marvel’s malaise won’t be so easy to snap out of.
Continue reading...The Scottish musician breaks health-related hiatus with gig in support of the suicide prevention charity Calm
Lewis Capaldi performed on stage for the first time in two years after making a surprise appearance at a charity gig in Edinburgh to raise funds for suicide prevention.
He appeared on Friday night at the concert – headlined by Tom Walker and Nina Nesbitt– at Edinburgh Assembly Halls, in aid of the charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm).
Continue reading...Musician whose hits also included the satirical anthem Supermodel from the Clueless soundtrack died early on Thursday
Jill Sobule, the singer-songwriter whose hits included the satirical anthem Supermodel from the Clueless movie soundtrack and the groundbreaking single I Kissed a Girl, has died in a house fire at the age of 66.
Sobule’s body was found in a home in Woodbury, Minnesota, on Thursday. Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire.
Continue reading...Actor makes dramatic bid for awards glory as UFC fighter Mark Kerr in biopic also starring his Jungle Cruise co-star Emily Blunt
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt aim for awards glory in the first trailer for fact-based sports drama The Smashing Machine.
The wrestler-turned-actor plays the MMA fighter Mark Kerr in the film inspired by the 2002 documentary with the same name. Kerr won multiple awards and medals in his career and also struggled with substance abuse.
Continue reading...Husband of murdered Labour MP says Belfast rappers’ talk of being unfairly targeted undermines their statement
Brendan Cox, the husband of the murdered MP Jo Cox, has said the Irish rap trio Kneecap have offered only “half an apology”, after criticism of comments in which they appear to call for politicians to be killed.
Kneecap apologised to Jo Cox’s family and that of the MP David Amess, who was also murdered, in the face of mounting criticism, including from Downing Street and Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader.
Continue reading...The American actor told Bill Maher’s podcast that he had asked Quincy Jones about the singer’s sexuality and felt he couldn’t ‘play that character 100%’
The actor Terrence Howard has said that he declined the role of Marvin Gaye in a film, because he didn’t want to kiss another man.
Speaking to Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast, the actor said the “biggest mistake” of his career was turning down the leading role in a separate biopic of the singer Smokey Robinson – which Robinson had personally asked him to play.
Continue reading...Perth will host huge exhibition of ancient treasures from first emperor’s tomb in June, with 40% of the artefacts leaving China for the first time ever
Two thousand years ago, in a bid to conquer death itself, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang commissioned a city of the dead: a 49 sq km mausoleum guarded by an army of clay warriors, built to defend his tomb for eternity.
When farmers near Xi’an unearthed the first clay head in 1974, they cracked open one of humanity’s greatest archaeological mysteries, with more than 8,000 Terracotta Warriors discovered over the last 50 years. Now, fragments of that dream of immortality rise again – this time in Perth, where the largest exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors ever staged in Australia will head later this year
Continue reading...Noel and Liam believed to have filmed promo video at Mildmay club in Newington Green ahead of summer’s sold-out Oasis tour
Liam and Noel Gallagher have performed together for the first time in 16 years in a working men’s club in north London, according to reports.
The brothers were pictured arriving at the Mildmay club in Newington Green, north London, on Thursday where they are believed to have filmed a promotional video for this summer’s sold-out Oasis reunion tour.
Continue reading...David A Graham’s latest book considers the vast far-right plan to change US politics – and why its architects are playing the long game
David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.
The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.
The Project is published in the US by Random House
Continue reading...Cheering crowd at 800-year-old cathedral enjoy Plague of Angels gig, which had been branded an ‘outright insult’
Protests at one of the most controversial concerts of the year failed to materialise on Friday evening, as a metal act performed to a cheering crowd of 1,400 people at York Minster.
The 800-year-old cathedral hosted a gig by Plague of Angels, which some of its congregation called an “outright insult” to their faith and said they would be protesting if the concert went ahead.
Continue reading...Cheering crowd at 800-year-old cathedral enjoy Plague of Angels gig, which had been branded an ‘outright insult’
Protests at one of the most controversial concerts of the year failed to materialise on Friday evening, as a metal act performed to a cheering crowd of 1,400 people at York Minster.
The 800-year-old cathedral hosted a gig by Plague of Angels, which some of its congregation called an “outright insult” to their faith and said they would be protesting if the concert went ahead.
Continue reading...In a statement, the 86-year-old director of the critical and box-office flop said the book confirms his feeling that ‘art can never be constrained’
Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m passion project, was neither a box office nor a critical success on release last year. Largely funded by the sale of Coppola’s own vineyards, the sci-fi epic starring Adam Driver took around $14m at the global box office amid unconvinced reviews and rumours of abnormal on-set behaviour by its director.
A marketing campaign attempted to leverage bad critical notices by flagging that previous works by Coppola now acclaimed as masterpieces – including Apocalypse Now and The Godfather – had been dismissed by critics at the time. But this backfired after it emerged all of the sniffy historical reviews had been fabricated.
Continue reading...Korean retailers report strong sales for Light and Thread, featuring speeches, essays and poems by novelist
A book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel prize lecture sold 10,000 copies in its first day on sale online.
Light and Thread, which takes its title from Han’s December lecture, is her first book to be published in South Korea since she was announced as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature last October.
Continue reading...The Herds project from the team behind Little Amal will travel 20,000km taking its message on environmental crisis across the world
Hundreds of life-size animal puppets have begun a 20,000km (12,400 mile) journey from central Africa to the Arctic Circle as part of an ambitious project created by the team behind Little Amal, the giant puppet of a Syrian girl that travelled across the world.
The public art initiative called The Herds, which has already visited Kinshasa and Lagos, will travel to 20 cities over four months to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
Continue reading...‘Nobody has been harder … about Donald Trump than me,’ Maher says after fellow comedian compared his meal with US president to meeting Hitler
Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.
Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”
Continue reading...Complaints about the book focus on cartoon sex scenes, one of which has been described by critics as ‘pornographic’ and ‘paedophilic’
Gender Queer, a graphic novel on gender identity, has been reapproved for sale in Australia following a conservative campaign against the book forcing the Classification Review Board to reconsider its initial decision.
The federal court last year ordered the board to reassess its decision to give the Maia Kobabe memoir an unrestricted M classification, after rightwing activist Bernard Gaynor challenged the ruling.
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