Category Archives: Culture

Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging Starmer to rethink AI copyright plans

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Hundreds of leading figures from UK creative industries urge prime minister not to ‘give our work away’

Hundreds of leading figures and organisations in the UK’s creative industries, including Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company, have urged the prime minister to protect artists’ copyright and not “give our work away” at the behest of big tech.

In an open letter to Keir Starmer, a host of major artists claim creatives’ livelihoods are under threat as wrangling continues over a government plan to let artificial intelligence companies use copyright-protected work without permission.

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Archibald prize 2025: Julie Fragar wins for portrait of artist Justene Williams

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Decision announced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where all finalists will be exhibited to the public from Saturday

Julie Fragar has won the 2025 Archibald prize for her portrait of her fellow artist Justene Williams.

Announced as the winner of the $100,000 prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Friday, the winning work was selected unanimously by the judges from 904 entries and 57 finalists.Fragar is just the 13th woman to win the prize in its 104-year history.

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James Foley, director of Fifty Shades sequels and Glengarry Glen Ross, dies aged 71

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The film-maker, whose credits also included many Madonna music videos, died of brain cancer

Director James Foley, whose credits included Glengarry Glen Ross and the Fifty Shades sequels, has died aged 71.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, his death was confirmed by his representative who said he died “peacefully in his sleep earlier this week following a years-long struggle with brain cancer”.

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Netherlands museum rethinks lending works to US amid Trump arts cuts

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Mauritshuis in The Hague says guarantees would be needed of artworks’ safety amid uncertainty caused by US funding cuts

A leading museum in the Netherlands has said it is reconsidering lending works from its collection to museums in the US amid the uncertainty wreaked by Donald Trump’s funding cuts and ideological impositions.

Martine Gosselink, the director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, whose collection includes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, said the turmoil had left her team wary of lending pieces to the US.

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Irish broadcaster requests discussion over Israel’s Eurovision participation

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RTÉ asks European Broadcasting Union for talks after 72 former contestants call for ban on Israeli broadcaster

Ireland’s public broadcaster has asked the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for a discussion about Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision song contest, as 72 former contestants called for the Israeli broadcaster Kan to be banned from next week’s event in the Swiss city of Basel.

The director general of Ireland’s RTÉ, Kevin Bakhurst, said in a statement on Wednesday that he was “appalled by the ongoing events in the Middle East and by the horrific impact on civilians in Gaza, and the fate of Israeli hostages”.

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Smokey Robinson denies four housekeepers’ allegations of sexual assault

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The women have accused Motown star of sexual assault and employment violations. His attorney has called the lawsuit ‘an ugly method of trying to extract money’

Smokey Robinson has denied allegations of sexual assault, after four former housekeepers of the Motown star filed a lawsuit with claims including sexual battery, false imprisonment, negligence and gender violence.

The suit was filed in a Los Angeles court on 6 May. It also alleges a series of labour violations, including that Robinson and his wife, Frances, failed to pay the women minimum wage and overtime, submitted inaccurate wage statements and created a hostile work environment. The women are seeking financial damages.

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Brad Arnold, frontman with rock band 3 Doors Down, diagnosed with stage four cancer

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Grammy-nominated and chart-topping singer says he has ‘no fear’ of illness in kidney and lung

Brad Arnold, the frontman with chart-topping US rock band 3 Doors Down, has been diagnosed with stage four cancer.

The singer said he has kidney cancer that has spread to his lungs. He discovered the illness after feeling unwell in recent weeks, “then I went to the hospital and got checked out and actually got the diagnosis that I had a renal carcinoma that had metastasised into my lung”.

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Jon Voight defends Trump’s film tariff plan: ‘Something has to be done’

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Oscar-winning actor gives first interview to Variety since working with Trump on plan to shake up Hollywood

Jon Voight, the actor who inspired Donald Trump’s surprise statement about placing a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, has given his first interview on the supposed plan to “give people back their dignity and their jobs”.

“Something has to be done, and it’s way past time,” the 86-year-old actor told Variety while he was, according to the magazine, “driving through what sounded like a car wash”.

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Bedfordshire residents say they have been left out of Universal theme park consultation

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Locals welcome plan but fear being pushed out of homes by theme park

When it was announced that Universal Pictures, one of the largest movie studios in the world, was opening its first theme park in Bedfordshire, fans were ecstatic.

Social media was filled with questions: Which film franchises will appear? How many rides would there be? Will there be a section dedicated to the Minions?

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RecipeTin Eats’ Nagi Maehashi beats Brooke Bellamy at publishing industry awards amid plagiarism allegations

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Maehashi beat five finalists to take out prestigious prize after her second cookbook broke Australian records for first-week nonfiction title sales

Recipe book writer Nagi Maehashi has beaten cupcake queen Brooke Bellamy at the publishing industry’s annual awards, as Maehashi and other authors accuse Bellamy of plagiarism.

Maehashi won the illustrated book of the year a second time at the Australian book industry awards night in Melbourne on Wednesday for her most recent book, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight.

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Front row? Dublin orders tourists to leave statue’s cleavage alone

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Touching breasts of city’s Molly Malone statue is supposed to bring luck, but not everyone is happy with tradition

Each time a tourist sidled up to the statue and reached for the most famous cleavage in Dublin, a voice called out: “No touching please.”

Two city council stewards stood vigil over the landmark on Tuesday to notify would-be gropers that Molly Malone was to be left alone. After years of supposedly bringing good luck to whomever touched the breasts, they were now off-limits.

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Denmark’s museum objects at risk from ‘extreme’ new mould, say conservators

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The ‘epidemic for Golden Age paintings’ may already be a global problem, with the fungi a possible health hazard

A new type of “extreme” mould is sweeping through Denmark’s museums, threatening some of the nation’s most important paintings and cultural objects, conservators have warned.

Described as an “epidemic for Golden Age paintings”, the highly resistant mould covers objects in a white coating and has been detected in 12 of the country’s museums, including the National Museum of Denmark and Skagens Museum.

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Trump called for 100% tariff on foreign films a day after Jon Voight proposed ‘limited’ tariffs

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Actor was assigned by Trump to come up with a plan to save Hollywood, but his proposal only included tariffs ‘in certain limited circumstances’

US president Donald Trump announced his 100% tariff on films “coming into our country produced in foreign lands” one day after meeting with actor Jon Voight to discuss his proposals to bring film production back to the US – which only suggested that tariffs could be used “in certain limited circumstances”.

The Midnight Cowboy and Heat actor, who was appointed a “special ambassador” to Hollywood by Trump, has been meeting with studios, streamers, unions and guilds for months to develop a plan to lure film and television productions back to the US. Production companies often seek more cost-effective locations or tax incentives in other countries such as Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Hungary, Italy and Spain.

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Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha wins Pulitzer prize for commentary

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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.

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Scholz to hand over power in Germany to sound of feminist anthem Respect

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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.

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Two arrested over bomb plot targeting Lady Gaga concert in Rio attended by millions

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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.

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Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’

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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.

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Marvel’s Thunderbolts* tops US box office with $76m opening

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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.

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Lewis Capaldi makes surprise return to live performance at charity gig

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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).

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Jill Sobule, I Kissed a Girl singer, dies in Minneapolis house fire aged 66

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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.

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