Category Archives: Culture

‘Parenting here means checking the ingredients of teargas’: my return to Hong Kong

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Emma-Lee Moss, who makes music as Emmy the Great, on life, new motherhood and her divided birthplace

It feels as if the entire world’s press is there, standing on the pavement outside the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. They’re in Hong Kong to cover the protests, but tonight, the Friday before National Day, they’re off duty. From the bottom of the hill, the bars of Lan Kwai Fong thrum reliably. There is an uneasy peace in the air, as though we all know that, three days from now, the long-running citywide demonstrations will reach a violent new apex.

I’ve walked this route hundreds of times, and been a parade of different selves. I’ve been a teenager trying to score 7-11 beer on the spot where Chungking Express was filmed. I’ve been a visiting writer ordering drinks at the FCC bar. But now I am the mother and primary carer of a nine-month-old, and my time out has been negotiated. Quite frankly, I am dazzled by the world after 7pm. As I shuffle past the media crowd, I feel a pull, a yearning. In another life, I’d be there with them. When I moved back to Hong Kong in 2018, it was in search of stories about the strange, convoluted city I was born in.

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DC drops Batman image after claims it supports Hong Kong unrest

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Picture trailing new Frank Miller comic showed Batwoman throwing a molotov cocktail against the legend: ‘The future is young’

DC Comics has pulled an image advertising its new Batman comic on social media following an angry backlash in China, where some believed it implied support of the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.

The since-deleted image showed Batwoman throwing a molotov cocktail against a backdrop of pink lettering reading: “The future is young.” Intended to promote Frank Miller and Rafael Grampá’s forthcoming Batman title Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child, it was shared on DC’s social media earlier this week.

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‘It’s cool now’: why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again

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Thanks to the popularity of open-world video games – and Stranger Things – a new generation has rediscovered the communal pleasures of the 80s role-playing phenomenon

Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped.

This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call “a moment”. The company behind the game, Wizards of the Coast, which bought the rights from original creator TSR, estimates that there are currently 40 million players worldwide, with new starters up 25% year on year, as its popularity grows and rules are translated into new languages.

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‘A very nice guy’: how Godfrey Gao made it to the top

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The late film star was a trailblazer for diversity in fashion and film. His loss deprives the growing Chinese entertainment industry of a fine talent

Taiwanese-Canadian actor Godfrey Gao was famous for being the first Asian international supermodel but he was much more than just a pretty face – he had a reputation for being one of the friendliest stars in an intensely competitive industry.

“He was known for being a very nice guy,” says Cecilia Pidgeon, a former celebrity editor at GQ China. “He had a very good reputation among other actors. He was always nice to his fans. All of the colleagues he worked with only had good things to say.”

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Viva Selena! How a murdered pop star gives hope to Latinos

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Twenty-five years after her death – and with a Netflix series on the way – Selena’s approach to straddling Mexican and American identities is proving invaluable in the age of Trump

On a sticky Sunday in August, more than 5,000 people are standing through sporadic torrents of rain to attend a free outdoor concert in New York’s Central Park. The event, Selena for Sanctuary, has been organised in response to the Trump administration’s severe policies on undocumented individuals, and the crowd has gathered to support immigrant-rights organisations such as Make the Road New York – all in the name of the pop star Selena Quintanilla.

Selena has been dead for nearly 25 years. The superstar was shot and killed in 1995, at the age of 23, by her fanclub manager, Yolanda Saldívar. Yet at the concert, she seems more present than ever: fans wear T-shirts emblazoned with her wide, red-lipped smile. Others wear one-piece jumpsuits and jackets with gleaming rhinestones, nods to the sparkling stage outfits Selena would often make herself. From the stage, a parade of up-and-coming bilingual artists belts out covers of her classic cumbia hits: Mexican-American indie star Cuco offers his take on Bidi Bidi Bom Bom, dream-pop newcomer Ambar Lucid sings Techno Cumbia, and Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis performs Como la Flor. Their songs are a celebration during a turbulent time, reflecting how Selena still serves as a symbol of hope in the fight for immigrants’ rights.

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Clive James, writer, broadcaster and TV critic, dies aged 80

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James died at his home in Cambridge on Sunday almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis

Clive James, the broadcaster, poet and television critic, has died aged 80 after a long illness.

The Australian died at his home in Cambridge on Sunday, his agent confirmed. A private funeral attended by family and close friends took place in the chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on Wednesday afternoon.

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Sir Jonathan Miller, writer and director, dies aged 85

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Theatre director also had career in medicine and was member of Beyond the Fringe

Sir Jonathan Miller, the writer, theatre and opera director, and member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy team, has died at the age of 85.

In a statement his family said Miller died “peacefully at home following a long battle with Alzheimer’s”.

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Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived

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Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers. Warning: contains graphic imagery

Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”

What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”

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Hungary pulls out of Eurovision amid rise in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric

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No reason given for withdrawal from show, called ‘homosexual flotilla’ by pro-Orbán journalist

Hungary will not participate in next year’s Eurovision song contest, amid speculation the decision was taken because the competition is “too gay” for the taste of the country’s far-right government and public media bosses.

While no official reason has been given for the withdrawal, the move comes amid an increase in homophobic rhetoric in Hungary, where the anti-migration prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has launched a “family first” policy aimed at helping traditional families and boosting birth rates.

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Melanie C: ‘I’ve had an incredible career. It’s time I accepted myself’

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It’s 20 years since Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm went solo, but, she says, it has taken until 2019 – ironically, the year of the band’s reunion tour – for her to really find herself

It’s often said that meeting a Spice Girl feels a lot like encountering a cartoon character. You can see it with unfiltered Mel B, poised Victoria and Emma, still resolutely family-friendly at 43. Geri’s modern lady-of-the-manor act is the antithesis of her old outrageousness, yet she is still swimming in camp. But with Mel C – or Melanie C as she styles herself these days – that’s not the case.

Even if she was your favourite Spice Girl, and you have never met one before, and she turns up to your interview in a closed Kings Cross bar wearing a hoodie and trackies – just as she would have done when Melanie Chisholm became Sporty Spice 25 years ago – it’s still only the little things that nod to the fact she was in one of the biggest girl groups of all time. She speaks quietly, often in an awed whisper, and is not beholden to the propaganda-like version of the Spice Girls’ story that some of her bandmates uphold.

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‘I was peeing and a polar bear popped up!’ Secrets of Seven Worlds, One Planet

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Shooting poachers, circling polar bears, flailing four-tonne seals, singing rhinos and the world’s worst sea … the team behind Attenborough’s latest extravaganza relive their thrills and spills

Chadden Hunter, producer, North America and South America

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Dresden museum heist: police release dramatic CCTV footage of suspect

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Footage shows man using axe to smash display case in Green Vault of Royal Palace

Police in Germany have released dramatic CCTV footage of one of two suspects in the Dresden jewellery heist using an axe to smash a display case in the state museum’s Green Vault.

Two robbers snatched priceless 18th-century jewellery in an astonishing smash-and-grab raid from the Grünes Gewölbe’s jewel room at the Royal Palace in the east German city on Monday morning. Local media have called it the biggest art heist of all time.

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Dresden jewellery heist: moment thieves break open display cabinet captured on CCTV – video

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Security footage from Monday morning has captured the moment thieves broke into Dresden's Green Vault museum and smashed open a display cabinet before stealing three ensembles of early 18th-century jewellery the museum has described as 'priceless'

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Destruction and panic as quake hits Albania – in pictures

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A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Albania early on Tuesday, killing four people and sparking panic in the capital, Tirana, and other cities. The epicentre of the quake, the strongest in the region in decades, was about 20 miles north-west of Tirana, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre

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Moroccan rapper jailed for one year over track about corruption

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Rights groups criticise treatment of Gnawi, whose video has been seen 15m times

A Moroccan rapper who recorded a viral track denouncing the state of the country has been sentenced to a year in prison for insulting the police in a case that rights groups have called “an outrageous assault on free speech”.

Mohamed Mounir, who performs under the name Gnawi, was also fined the equivalent of $103 (£79) after confessing to cursing about the police in a video he posted online in late October. He can appeal the sentence.

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Adam Cohen on Leonard: ‘It was daunting finishing my dad’s last music’

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Leonard Cohen’s final songs can now be heard on the album Thanks for the Dance. Here his son Adam talks about their emotionally complex relationship

“There are some songs I’m half way through that are not bad,” Leonard Cohen said in his final interview, published in the New Yorker on 17 October 2016. “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs.” Three weeks later, on 7 November, having released his 14th album, You Want It Darker, Cohen died in his sleep after a fall in his home in Los Angeles. The task of finishing those songs was passed, at Cohen’s request, to his son, Adam. The results can be heard on Thanks for the Dance, released last Friday.

“Essentially, I wanted to take the listener on an unconscious journey through the sonic signatures of my father’s career, without it sounding like a regurgitation,” says Adam Cohen, who, in his soft Canadian cadences and carefully constructed sentences, can sound uncannily like his father. “My dad always rejected invitations from producers like Rick Rubin and Don Was to make a retro record that sounded like his older stuff. He said he didn’t want to do the nostalgia act.”

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Selfies, influencers and a Twitter president: the decade of the social media celebrity

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From Gyneth Paltrow to Trump, today’s stars speak directly to their fans. But are they really controlling their message?

I have a friend, Adam, who is an autograph seller – a niche profession, and one that is getting more niche by the day. When we met for breakfast last month he was looking despondent.

“Everyone takes selfies these days,” he said sadly, picking at his scrambled eggs. “It’s never autographs any more. They just want photos of themselves with celebrities.”

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Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for ‘final solution’

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In wide-ranging speech, actor accuses tech giants of running the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’

Read Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing attack on Facebook in full

Sacha Baron Cohen has denounced tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google as “the greatest propaganda machine in history” and culpable for a surge in “murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities”.

Baron Cohen was speaking on Thursday at Never Is Now, the Anti-Defamation League’s summit on antisemitism and hate in New York, where he was presented with the organisation’s international leadership award. He said that “hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities” and that “all this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history”.

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Real Madrid: film festival puts city’s forgotten district on map

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Residents of the Cañada Real, Europe’s largest shantytown, are hoping the 16kms festival will challenge the area’s fearsome reputation for drug dealing and poverty

Just 15 minutes from the centre of Madrid lies Europe’s largest shantytown: 16km of thousands of houses, shacks and tents lining the roaring M-50 motorway. The Cañada Real has been the Spanish capital’s forgotten neighbourhood for decades, both thriving and suffering in the city’s blind spot.

This multicultural community is home to about 7,300 people living in six sectors – but it is Sector 6 that has given it its somewhat fearsome reputation. Here, drug addicts shuffle along listlessly as the dealers flag them – and passing journalists – down to offer cannabis, cocaine and heroin.

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