New wave singer behind hits including Good Times Roll and Shake It Up found dead in his New York apartment
Ric Ocasek, the lead singer of the 1980s band the Cars, has died at the age of 75.
New York police confirmed to the Washington Post that officers responded to a 911 call on Sunday afternoon. Ocasek was pronounced dead at the scene, with no sign of foul play.
Continue reading...The artist and serial prankster Maurizio Cattelan denies stealing 18-carat loo entitled America from Blenheim Palace
The artist who made a solid gold toilet reportedly worth £4.8m has denied orchestrating its theft in a Banksy-style prank.
The 18-carat working loo was ripped from a wood-panelled room at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, in the early hours of Saturday.
Continue reading...Kolkata, one of Asia’s great melting pots, is the last place on Earth where rickshaw wallahs still haul people and goods through narrow lanes. With just hundreds left, Palani Mohan’s images capture them as they disappear.
Almost all of the pullers originate from the state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest. They come here looking for work, leaving their families behind in the villages. It’s a hard and lonely existence, and one that is slowly dying out. The government of West Bengal state has described the jobs of the rickshaw pullers as ‘barbaric’, ‘despicable’ and ‘inhuman’. There is no place in the world today, it says, for ‘human horses’. Men with bare feet pulling others for 18 hours a day in the heat and the rain, for just a few rupees. But the city’s residents disagree
Continue reading...The No Logo author talks about solutions to the climate crisis, Greta Thunberg, birth strikes and how she finds hope
• Read an extract from her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal here
Why are you publishing this book now?
I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.
The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?
When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.
Singer ‘scared shitless but feeling super free right now’ and asks fans to be kind
The pop star Sam Smith has come out as non-binary and asked to be addressed by the pronouns they/them. Smith, 27, wrote on Instagram: “After a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out.”
In an interview with Jameela Jamil published in March, Smith said: “I’m not male or female, I think I flow somewhere in between. It’s all on the spectrum.” Smith described being non-binary as “your own special creation”.
Continue reading...Debate over Netherlands’ colonial past resurfaces with switch to ‘17th century’ as alternative
One of the Netherlands’ most prestigious museums has fuelled fresh debate over the the country’s colonial past by deciding it will no longer use the term Golden Age to describe the 17th century when it was at its pinnacle as a military and trading power.
The Amsterdam Museum said that in an attempt to be “polyphonic and inclusive”, the common description of the century in which the Netherlands bestrode the world stage would be banned from its exhibits.
Continue reading...The Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Liu Heung Shing’s images record China’s rise from self-imposed ruin to today’s superpower. His new book presents scenes of hope, hardship and change under Communist party rule. A Life in a Sea of Red is published by Steidl
Continue reading...At 19, Legler broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. But she was also an alcoholic and drug dealer who had suffered years of abuse from her trainers. She is surprised she is still alive, she says
One day, when she was a teenager, Casey Legler woke up with a hangover, then jumped into a pool and broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. The year was 1996 and Legler was in Atlanta, a member of the French team, having a practice session as she awaited the Olympic finals the next day. Legler, at 6ft 2in, was built to swim. She had been groomed to be an Olympian from the age of 12. But when the finals came – the biggest day of her professional life – she bombed, coming 29th in the women’s 50m freestyle. She spent the next day drunk and dealing cocaine – to Olympic teammates and teenage members of other international teams.
That is perhaps the most troubling aspect of Legler’s new memoir, which charts her time as one of the fastest female swimmers in the world. This isn’t just the story of an alcoholic girl who, under the supposedly protective wing of coaches and doctors, was sexually abused and given performance-enhancing drugs. It’s how her experience was not unusual among her female peers. She remembers, for instance, a teenage member of the English Olympic team asking her to buy drugs. Alcohol and drug use, she says, were commonplace among top-level child athletes, not just in celebratory post-competition blow-outs but every night. From the age of 12, “I swam for every chance to get wasted,” she writes.
Continue reading...The annual Infra Jatra festival, named after the god of rain and heaven, is celebrated by worshipping, singing, dancing and feasting in Kathmandu valley
Continue reading...Mark Lewisohn knows the Fab Four better than they knew themselves. The expert’s tapes of their tense final meetings shed new light on Abbey Road – and inspired a new stage show
The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.
They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”
Continue reading...A new book says the actor was scared of going on the record at first but then encouraged other women to speak out
Gwyneth Paltrow has been named a key figure in the New York Times story that first catalogued a series of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and led to the film producer’s dismissal from his own company and subsequent prosecution.
In a new book titled She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – the New York Times reporters whose story on 5 October 2017 triggered Weinstein’s downfall – Paltrow is said to have been “scared to go on the record but became an early, crucial source, sharing her account of sexual harassment and trying to recruit other actresses to speak”.
Continue reading...Along a forest road in the small town of Monte Negro in Rondônia state, just south of the Amazon basin, cowboys from the area’s vast cattle ranches display their talent at a rodeo. In recent years, Monte Negro has expanded as a key cattle town with a strong cowboy culture
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s social media behaviour took another surreal turn with a public attack on model Chrissy Teigen and her musician husband John Legend over the issue of criminal justice reform.
Related: 'A dynasty for decades': Trump aide stokes succession speculation – live
Continue reading...Raised in Zambia, the rapper moved to the US and made her name in Australia. Returning to her roots – and carrying the weight of representation – terrified her
Sampa the Great was terrified before she stepped on stage to play her first ever show in Africa earlier this year. The show was in the Zambian capital of Lusaka – and the artist, MC and poet’s cousins were in the front row.
“I’m based in Australia and all the monumental moments in my career have happened there,” says Sampa (born Sampa Tembo). “But I’m from Zambia. My fear was that they wouldn’t get it – and their opinion matters most.” She sums up her concerns: “A person coming out of Africa and playing globally while still being themselves and pushing for their own culture – to go home and not be understood.”
Continue reading...The Natural History Museum has released a selection of highly commended photographs from a range of categories. The winners will be announced on 15 October and the exhibition opens on 18 October
Continue reading...Visitors have been asked not to share photographs of exhibits including Arno Breker statue
An exhibition of Nazi design has opened in the Netherlands to protests and a request for visitors to the museum not to take and share photographs for fear of the exhibits being glorified on social media.
The Museum of Design in Den Bosch is showcasing sculpture by Adolf Hitler’s favourite artist, Arno Breker, a 1943 VW Beetle, photos and Leni Riefenstahl films from the era, in what is being billed as the first great exposition of the “Design of the Third Reich”.
Continue reading...The multi-hyphenate star delivers a standout turn in a snappy, fact-based caper about strippers scamming Wall Street bankers
After the dog days of August, littered with one lazily patchworked Hollywood product after another, there’s something wickedly indulgent about the arrival of Hustlers, a slick, flashy, seductively entertaining segue from one season to the next. It’s ideally positioned, premiering at the Toronto film festival before a mid-September release: it matches the immediate gratification of a summer movie with the artful substantiveness of an awards contender – yet remains not quite definable as either.
Related: From Fyre festival to Hustlers: why are we so obsessed with scammers?
Continue reading...Comic book movie starring Joaquin Phoenix takes top award and An Officer and a Spy wins grand jury prize
Joker, Todd Phillips’ mordant spin on Gotham’s grinning antihero, has won the Golden Lion award at the 76th Venice film festival.
The film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a would-be standup comic, was ecstatically received at its premiere on the Lido last weekend, with critics immediately tipping it to be the first superhero film to take the best picture Oscar.
Continue reading...Lledr valley, Snowdonia: Birdsong scatters like elegies here where once an old woman screamed her curses
This split rock with the wizened rowan growing from its cleft – I was first made aware of it by the old butcher from Dolwyddelan who gave me a lift along the valley one wet day when I was a young teenager on my first walking tour through Wales. He drew his Morris van to a halt, gestured towards it and gave me its name: Maen yr hen wraig sy’n melltithio – the stone of the old cursing woman.
In some earlier time, he told me, a woman would stand on top of it and scream imprecations at passersby. He showed me a kind of cave behind it. “Some say she used to live in there,” he added. He knew no more than those folk memories, which have hovered in my mind for 60 years.
Continue reading...The 36-year-old New York musician tweeted that she’s ‘decided to retire’ from the music business
Rap star Nicki Minaj has announced she’s leaving the music business because she wants to make family life her priority.
The 36-year-old Trinidadian rapper, who grew up in New York and is known for her outlandish outfits, bizarre alter egos and fast flow, made the announcement in a tweet on Thursday morning.
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