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Tag: iab-entertainment

  • Ringo Starr says The Beatles would ‘never’ fake John Lennon’s vocals with AI on new song | CNN

    Ringo Starr says The Beatles would ‘never’ fake John Lennon’s vocals with AI on new song | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Ringo Starr is doubling down about the authenticity of the vocals on the highly anticipated new Beatles song recently teased by former bandmate Paul McCartney.

    Starr spoke with Rolling Stone for an upcoming podcast, in which he ensured that they would “never” fake the late John Lennon’s vocals for the new track, which instead uses AI to clean up previously recorded snippets.

    The song will also feature the voice of the late George Harrison, Starr confirmed.

    Paul McCartney says a ‘final’ Beatles song is coming

    “This was beautiful,” he said, noting, “it’s the final track you’ll ever hear with the four lads. And that’s a fact.”

    McCartney attempted to clarify last month how artificial intelligence is being used on what he said will be the “final” Beatles song.

    “We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it,” he wrote in a note posted on his verified Instagram story at the time. “Seems to be a lot of guess work out there.”

    “Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it,” he added. “We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years.”

    In a June 13 interview with BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program, the legendary musician, 81, said that AI technology was being used to release a “new” track featuring all four Beatles, including fellow band members Lennon and Harrison, who died in 1980 and 2001, respectively.

    “When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record – it was a demo that John had that we worked on and we just finished it up, it will be released this year – and we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney said. “So then we were able to mix the record as you would normally do.”

    Starr, meanwhile, is about to celebrate his 83rd birthday on July 7.

    The music icon, who just finished a spring tour with his All-Starr Band, told Rolling Stone that he’s feeling great. “You never know when you’re gonna drop, that’s the thing,” he added. “And I’m not dropping yet.”

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  • California is about to give Hollywood studios a lucrative tax deal during the writers’ strike | CNN Business

    California is about to give Hollywood studios a lucrative tax deal during the writers’ strike | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    The state of California is about to give movie and TV studios a new lucrative tax perk.

    A bill awaiting California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature would the state’s tax incentive program for film and TV productions for five years but with a key update: Studios with more tax credits than they can use will be able to exchange those credits for cash. The bill, part of the state’s overall budget plan, was passed by California legislators on Tuesday, and Newsom is expected to sign it on Friday.

    The bill also mandates any production that receives the tax credit to comply with new on-set firearm safety protocols following the 2021 deadly shooting on the set of Alec Baldwin’s film “Rust,” and it implements requirements aiming to meet diversity hiring targets.

    The new, refundable tax credits come as competition for film and TV production from other states and countries is on the rise. States like New York and Georgia are gaining share of the TV and film market, thanks to their own tax incentive programs, according to a 2021 report from FilmLA — a nonprofit organization that helps creators with production planning and film permitting.

    The bill should be a boon for studios like Netflix. The streaming giant had not previously been able to take full advantage of the tax credit program since it uses a separate research and development incentive from California to significantly reduce its tax liability. In a 2020 SEC filing, Netflix said it had $250 million in California R&D tax credits — far more than it could use.

    Disney and Comcast’s Universal Studios were the only two studios that benefited under California’s existing tax incentive program, due to their relatively larger tax bills from theme parks, according to Democratic assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, one of the bill’s sponsors. The new bill could benefit other studios that don’t have theme parks in the state, including Warner Bros, which is owned by CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

    The bill’s safety measures require productions to employ an adviser to oversee production safety and complete detailed risk assessments. Studios must also establish training requirements and standards that focus on the safe handling of firearms. Many of these safety protocols were voluntary before the bill.

    Dave Cortese, the Democratic state senator who introduced the safety protocols in the bill, said research for the legislation began soon after actor Baldwin fired a live round of ammunition from what he said he believed to be an unloaded prop gun during a film’s rehearsal. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed.

    “Conversations about this legislation started the week after the tragic loss of a cinematographer. Those negotiations have produced the nation’s first and best safety practices for California workers in the state’s vital motion picture industry,” Cortese said.

    In addition to refundable tax credits and stricter safety standards, the bill establishes specific diversity requirements. Studios must submit data about the diversity of their workforce to qualify for the full credit. The bill also adds a new member to the state’s film commission with diversity, equity, and inclusion expertise.

    The tax perk for Hollywood comes amid ongoing tension between the industry’s workforce and the studios’ bosses. The Writers Guild of America, has been on strike since early May, halting the production of many shows. The association’s more than 11,000 members are fighting over substantial issues like pay, the number of writers staffed on any given project, and whether artificial intelligence can be used in writing material.

    Actors may soon stage a work stoppage, as well. Members of the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, have voted to authorize a strike against the major studios if they cannot agree to the terms of a new contract. Similar to the WGA, the actors’ union has voiced similar concerns about pay and the use of AI.

    Democratic lawmakers in California celebrated the bill. Carrillo said the plan was a “grand compromise,” and it would help protect jobs in the state.

    “These are hundreds of thousands of jobs, most of which impact Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles. They’re good union jobs, they’re production jobs, they’re creative jobs,” she said.

    However, the bill has attracted some criticism. Chris Hoene, the executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center, a nonprofit think tank that provides analysis on state budget issues intending to improve outcomes for low-income communities and people of color in the state, called it “bad policy.”

    “Refundable tax credits were designed to help low-income households… so to take that refundability structure and apply it to a business tax credit, you would think there are some film companies that struggle to make ends meet and don’t make enough money to owe any taxes, but that’s not how it works,” he said.

    Hoene called the new policy a “giveaway that doesn’t have any positive outcomes.”

    The refundable credits are designed to help more than just the big studios, Carrillo said. Film and TV productions help support surrounding businesses in the area, including “small restaurants and catering services,” Carrillo said.

    “It’s very important that California has a competitive advantage and ultimately keeps these jobs and productions in our state while other states continue to announce more incentives,” she added.

    Still, Hoene argued that there were more effective ways to create well-paying jobs in California.

    “If we wanted to take scarce state resources to help workers, we could do that in ways that could provide them with assistance directly, rather than giving it to large corporations who are already minimizing their tax bills in other ways,” he said.

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  • The demo tape that launched Prince’s legendary career is now up for auction | CNN

    The demo tape that launched Prince’s legendary career is now up for auction | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For years, the demo tape that launched Prince’s storied career had been tucked away in an attic of the home of the music executive that first signed him.

    Now, music enthusiasts and Prince fans worldwide have a chance to own the tape that landed the Minneapolis superstar his first record contract as it goes up for auction, according to Boston-based auction house RR Auction.

    The demo, recorded in 1976 and still in its original custom packaging, is part of the Marvels of Modern Music auction that ends on Thursday.

    It contains unreleased versions of the songs “Just As Long as We’re Together” and “My Love is Forever,” as well as the never-released “Jelly Jam.”

    Prince was just 18 years old when he recorded the tracks – all written, sung, arranged and played by himself – at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis, RR Auction said in a news release.

    “It is the original tape, so this is the birth of who became known as Prince,” Bobby Livingston, RR Auction’s executive vice president of public relations, told CNN.

    “It’s incredible because it comes from the record executive whom it was sent to, so it has this unbroken chain of custody,” Livingston said.

    The special artifact was discovered by Jeff Gold, a former Warner Bros. Records executive vice president and general manager who was friends with music industry executive Russ Thyret.

    Thyret, who later served as the record company’s CEO and chairman, signed Prince to Warner Bros. on June 25, 1977, shortly after his 19th birthday.

    Gold, who today runs an online business selling high-end collectibles and helps artists value their archives, said he received a call from Thyret’s widow, who lives in Los Angeles. Thyret died in 2021.

    “(She said), ‘Russ saved a lot of stuff and it’s all up in the attic of our house – would you come take a look and help me figure out what to do with it, and buy anything you’re interested in?’” Gold told CNN.

    He said he came across a couple of boxes containing tapes in the attic.

    The demo features unreleased versions of three original Prince songs.

    “When I saw (the demo tape), I knew exactly what it was,” Gold said. “I was very excited when I saw it, but guardedly so, because you never know if the tape’s going to be playable or if the tape has the wrong thing in the box – but happily, this one had the right thing.”

    The demo tape up for auction comes with a plexiglass display case, a business card belonging to Thyrett, a CD transfer of the tape’s audio and a letter of provenance from Gold, according to RR Auction.

    Several other Prince items are being auctioned, including the lace glove he wore on stage during the Purple Rain tour and a sealed first pressing of “The Black Album,” the auction house said.

    Previously auctioned Prince items have sold for big price tags. The original lyrics of his song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” sold for $150,000, according to Livingston.

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  • Cormac McCarthy, among America’s greatest authors, dies at 89 | CNN

    Cormac McCarthy, among America’s greatest authors, dies at 89 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Cormac McCarthy, long considered one of America’s greatest writers for his violent and bleak depictions of the United States and its borderlands in novels like “Blood Meridian,” “The Road” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died on Tuesday, according to his Penguin Random House publisher Alfred A. Knopf. He was 89.

    McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Knopf said.

    Over a nearly 60-year career, McCarthy – hailed by the late literary critic Howard Bloom as the “true heir” of Herman Melville and William Faulkner – wrote a dozen novels, many of them critically celebrated if not commercial hits, though he would eventually achieve both. For years, he wrote while living on grants, most notably the MacArthur “genius grant,” which he was awarded in 1981.

    Despite accolades, McCarthy remained relatively obscure for much of his career; as recently as 1992, 27 years after his first book was published, the New York Times Book Review said he “may be the best unknown novelist in America.”

    Both before and since, McCarthy was seen and portrayed in the media as reclusive, eschewing the kind of book tours, signings, interviews and lectures other renowned writers would see as professional obligations. But McCarthy famously abhorred talking about his books, which principally featured male characters and profuse violence, as well as sparse punctuation.

    Still, he was a “writer’s writer,” the Times reported, with a cult following and a reputation “far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales.”

    “I never had any doubts about my abilities,” McCarthy told the Times in one of his few interviews. “I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.”

    That obscurity changed with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first installment of his “Border Trilogy,” which became a bestseller and won the 1992 National Book Award, at last marrying the critical acclaim he’d enjoyed with mainstream success.

    His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Road,” which followed a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America, further catapulted McCarthy to popularity, thanks in part to Oprah Winfrey selecting the novel for her book club. McCarthy, in turn, granted Oprah his first and only television interview.

    “The Road” was also one of several of McCarthy’s books adapted for film, most notably the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won four Academy Awards, including best picture.

    The author was born Charles McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. His family moved when he was still young to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was an attorney for the Tennessee Valley Authority. His was a relatively comfortable childhood, one that played out on a plot of wooded land in a large white house with maids.

    “We were considered rich,” he told the Times, “because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks.”

    For all his later literary achievements, McCarthy was not a voracious reader in his childhood or adolescence. It wasn’t until he served in the US Air Force after dropping out of the University of Tennessee that McCarthy began reading extensively, in his barracks while stationed in Alaska, he told the Times.

    He would later move to Chicago, where he finished his first novel and in 1961 married his first wife, Lee Holleman, with whom he had a son. They soon divorced.

    That novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” was published in 1965, after shepherding by the famous Random House editor Albert Erskine, who also edited Faulkner. Erskine, who died in 1993, would go on to edit McCarthy for two decades despite the fact, Erskine admitted to the Times, that McCarthy’s books never sold.

    “Outer Dark” followed in 1968 and “Child of God” in 1973, after a stint in Ibiza and McCarthy’s subsequent return to Tennessee with his second wife, Annie DeLisle. But still, they lived in “total poverty,” DeLisle once said, “bathing in the lake.”

    “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books,” DeLisle told the New York Times. “And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

    But McCarthy didn’t become a writer to make money, instead “maybe simply, because I can do it,” he told the Maryville-Alcoa Times, a Tennessee newspaper, in 1971. “There are a lot of easier ways to make money. I could sell tickets to people and let them watch while I was run over by a truck.”

    His next novel, “Suttree,” was published in 1979. McCarthy was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship two years later, giving him financial security to focus on writing. McCarthy left DeLisle and used the money to abscond to the Southwest, where he spent the next several years steeped in research for “Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West,” published in 1985.

    The historically based novel – widely regarded as McCarthy’s masterpiece – follows a brutal gang of scalp hunters as they journey across the Southwest, massacring Apache and members of the Mexican Army.

    “All the Pretty Horses” was published in 1992 and was followed over years by “The Crossing” and “Cities of the Plain,” which together comprise “The Border Trilogy” – in all a more idyllic ode to the region that recounted the adventures of two young cowboys.

    “No Country for Old Men” in 2005 received a less positive critical reception than McCarthy’s earlier novels, though its standing improved with time. The book, which the author began as a screenplay, did well as a movie under the direction of Joel and Ethan Coen, with the talents of Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin, as well as Javier Bardem as the fearsome but unforgettable killer Anton Chigurh, a role that won Bardem Academy Award for best supporting actor.

    McCarthy’s attention turned away from the American West for 2006’s “The Road.” The book, dedicated to his then-young son – he had by then divorced and remarried again – was conceived on a trip to El Paso, Texas, he told Winfrey, as he looked out the hotel window one night.

    “I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy,” he said, and wrote a couple pages. Revisiting the idea several years later, he realized those pages were the beginning of a book about a man and his son traveling through that ashen landscape while staving off the threat of cannibals.

    The book wrote itself, he said, in a few weeks’ time.

    The ensuing years were quiet ones, with little in the way of new material. By this time, McCarthy was spending much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, an independent research group of mostly scientists where he eventually became a lifetime trustee.

    McCarthy, whose interest in the sciences was well-documented, enjoyed the company of the physicists, biologists and geologists at the institute, and it was there he was often seen writing on his Olivetti typewriter, working on his next novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” released just six weeks apart in 2022.

    The books dealt with the same story from different perspectives and featured a female main character as McCarthy’s dearth of well-developed women protagonists in his writing had long been a point of criticism. After being married three times, he told Oprah, “I don’t pretend to understand women.”

    But he alluded to the twin novels and their story’s female protagonist in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2009, saying, “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.”

    As for the lavish amounts of violence in his work, McCarthy told Vanity Fair in 2005 he didn’t know what resonated with him about that theme, only that he felt death was the principal motif at the heart of all our lives.

    “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us,” he said. “It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.”

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  • Taylor Swift sets summer’s hottest dress code: Sequins, boots, cowboy hats | CNN Business

    Taylor Swift sets summer’s hottest dress code: Sequins, boots, cowboy hats | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    What’s the dress code of Summer 2023? Call it TikTok-approved coastal cowgirl aesthetic. Or, in other words, the Taylor Swift look.

    With the superstar entertainer pulling in record-breaking crowds for “The Eras Tour,” retailers across the country are marketing to “Swifties,” aggressively and inventively, as her 52-stadium tour hits their towns.

    Women’s clothing-company founder Taylor Johnson said that, from one Taylor to another, she owes Swift a big “Thank You” for going on tour again and making sparkly sequined dresses, cowboy hats and rhinestone boots massively saleable. “This has become a wild year already for us because of Taylor Swift,” said Johnson, CEO of Hazel & Olive.

    One of their dresses in particular, called aThe Eras Sequin Fringe Dress, which retails for $129, is on fire. “Our phones have been blowing up and we’ve been getting hundreds of calls and Instagram messages about that dress,” she said.

    Francesca’s, a fashion chain with 454 boutiques nationwide, expected Swift’s tour to have an impact. But ruffle, prairie, babydoll and bow-back style dresses get a 30% jump in sales at the stores when Swift is in town, said Leanne Neale, vice president of concept and creative with the Houston company.

    Trendy clothing chain Altar’d State has proactively gone all-in on Swift mania by curating looks from its collection for every one of the Swift albums. “Enter your Era,” it invites.

    Swift’s “The Eras Tour,” was infamous before it even began. The concerts were so wildly anticipated that ticket presale on Ticketmaster became a highly publicized debacle. Ticketmaster blamed extraordinary demand for crashing its website and eventually canceled ticket sales to the public. Many were left without a ticket even after purchase.

    The mess drew the ire of lawmakers, leading to a Justice Department investigation and a congressional hearing.

    Taylor Swift performs onstage during night one of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour at Nissan Stadium on May 05, 2023 in Nashville, Tennessee.

    Ticketmaster apologized to Swift and her fans for the “terrible experience” and said it would work to “shore up our tech for the new bar that has been set by demand” for Swift’s tour.

    That was too little too late for some fans who took Ticketmaster (and parent company Live Nation) to court.

    But the show must go on, and it did, with Swift headed to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium (seating capacity: 82,500) for shows into and over the Memorial Day weekend.

    At Altar’d State, “We’ve never prepped stores this way but we’re calling it Taylor week,” said Callie Lewis, chief merchandising officer. Mannequins wearing Swift-inspired looks are placed front and center in their stores along with other concert-friendly merchandise such as clear handbags that meet security protocols at concert venues.

    What’s moving? Everything from sundresses and metallic boots to romantic, breezy long dresses, tulle tops, daring red gowns and lots and lots and lots of fringe. “We can’t restock fast enough,” said Lewis. Hot sellers include lavender-colored clothing (inspired by Swift’s song Lavender Haze.)

    Altar'd State stores have curated Taylor Swift looks for concert goers.

    Swift isn’t the only hot concert tour influencing the fashion business in 2023. Neale at francesca’s said she’s looking to Beyonce’s “Renaissance” tour firing up demand for concertwear, too. Francesca’s stores, she said will also curate looks that appeal to the BeyHive.

    Retailer Johnson admits that all this mad dash for product is a good problem to have, given that as much as 80% of Hazel & Olive’s monthly orders currently are for concert looks. (She declined to disclose her annual sales but said she operates a multimillion-dollar-a-year small business.

    Beyonce fans queue to enter to the Friends Arena to watch her first concert of the World Tour named

    Johnson said she’s been ordering the maximum quantity of the most in-demand concert styles from her supplier, but even that’s not enough, lately.

    “As soon as I get more inventory in, it sells outs quickly,” she said, adding that she’s even flying in merchandise at a higher cost from her suppliers in China, instead of shipping it via sea as she usually does, in order to speed up delivery. As for the Taylor Swift bump to business, Johnson said she’s grateful for it.

    “This is crazy. I need Taylor Swift to go on concert year-round because we’re now on pace to have our biggest sales year yet,” she said.

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  • Man indicted for the murder of rapper Takeoff | CNN

    Man indicted for the murder of rapper Takeoff | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A grand jury in Harris County, Texas, on Thursday indicted a man for the murder of Takeoff, a member of the rap group Migos.

    Patrick Clark, 33, was arrested in connection with the death in December.

    Takeoff, 28, was shot to death outside a private party at 810 Billiards and Bowling in Houston on November 1. “There was an argument outside the bowling alley which led to the shooting,” Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said at the time. Another man, Cameron Joshua, was arrested and charged with unlawful carrying of a weapon in relation to the shooting.

    Police described Takeoff as an “innocent bystander” to the argument that preceded the shooting.

    In the arraignment document, the state claims Clark “unlawfully, intentionally and knowingly commit the felony offense of Deadly Conduct by knowingly discharging a firearm at and in the direction of” Takeoff.

    Clark’s defense attorney, Letitia Quiñones-Hollins, told CNN that the indictment was expected.

    “We would ask people to remember that getting an indictment requires meeting a very, very minimal standard of proof,” she said in a statement. “When we get inside a courtroom and in front of a jury, where we will be able to put on our evidence and cross-examine the state’s witnesses – where the standard of proof is guilt beyond reasonable doubt – we expect the jury will come back with a verdict of not guilty.”

    Clark remains under house arrest on $1 million bond.

    Takeoff was the youngest member of the trio Migos, alongside his uncle Quavo and rapper Offset. Artists including Justin Bieber and Drake remembered Takeoff as a talented rapper and loving friend and family member at his memorial last year.

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  • Andy Rourke, former bassist with The Smiths, dead at 59 | CNN

    Andy Rourke, former bassist with The Smiths, dead at 59 | CNN

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Andy Rourke, bassist for legendary English rock band The Smiths, has died at age 59 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, his former bandmate announced Friday.

    “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Andy Rourke after a lengthy illness with pancreatic cancer,” guitarist Johnny Marr wrote on Twitter.

    “Andy will be remembered as a kind and beautiful soul by those who knew him and as a supremely gifted musician by music fans,” Marr said.

    “We request privacy at this sad time,” he added.

    Rourke joined The Smiths in 1982, and played alongside the band until their split in 1987 ahead of the release of their fourth studio album, “Strangeways, Here We Come.”

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  • This 1960s trailblazer of erotic pop art died just as she was finding fame | CNN

    This 1960s trailblazer of erotic pop art died just as she was finding fame | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Untold Art History investigates lesser-known stories in art, spotlighting pioneering artists who were overlooked during their lifetimes, as well as uncovering new insights into influential artworks that radically shift our understanding of them.



    CNN
     — 

    Throughout Evelyne Axell’s short but radical career, the Belgian artist revered the female body in psychedelic hues rendered in gleaming enamel. Nude women recline in acid green or cerulean blue fields under open skies; in one portrait, bodies and landscape become indistinguishable, with rings of colors forming the volume of a perm and tufts of grass the pubic hair.

    She delighted in double meanings. Axell’s most famous artwork, of a woman licking an ice cream cone, could be both a summery advertisement or an explicit pornographic scene. She named another painting, of red heels on a gas pedal, “Axell-ération” — an implied self-portrait, like many of her works.

    But the young actor-turned-Pop artist, who was working in the 1960s and early ’70s and had been trained by the famed surrealist artist René Magritte, had her career cut short. In 1972, only a handful of years into painting, she died in a car crash and faded into relative obscurity. Only in the past decade as curators have revisited the pop art movement beyond celebrated male artists — such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton — has Axell arisen as one of the many women co-opting mass media to engage with the social structures and politics of the ‘60s.

    “If you asked almost anybody to name a woman pop artist, you would probably get a blank stare,” said Catherine Morris, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, which hosted the touring show “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968” in 2011. The landmark group show featured Axell and contemporaries including Pauline Boty and Chryssa.

    “(If this) period of emergence of women Pop artists had even been a couple of years later, we probably would have been more aware,” Morris continued, pointing to the 1970s as a turning point for women artists in the wake of second-wave feminism. “This whole group of women who covered this decade were dramatically overlooked.”

    Since “Seductive Subversion,” which first exhibited at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Axell’s work has been included in a host of significant group shows that take a more expansive, international view of pop art and foreground women. And in 2021, she achieved a significant posthumous milestone, with the Museum of Modern Art in New York adding “Axell-ération” to its collection. But institutional solo exhibitions remain few and far between, with retrospectives hosted by Museum Abteiberg in western Germany and the remote Swiss Alps art center Muzeum Susch 10 years apart. (Perhaps, in part, because of her limited output.)

    Now, two of Axell’s playful, erotic artworks— both painted with her signature application of enamel on plexiglass — are poised to make history at Christie’s, in her first major New York sale. “Paysage” a dreamy pastoral nude, is expected to surpass her record of $140,000, set in 2017, with a high estimate of $200,000; “L’Amazone”, a sensual blue-ombre hued portrait, could also come close at $120,000. But such sales for Axell are infrequent, according to Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art.

    “She made very little work — she was 37-years-old when she died,” Friedlander said in a phone call. “So, in a way, the market doesn’t have enough to know what to do with her. These (paintings) are very special and very rare.”

    The decade following Axell’s death saw the emergence of a number of women artists who unabashedly expressed female sexuality, painting and photographing their own bodies, and subverting erotic or pornographic imagery. Artists such as Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter believed that feminism should be inclusive of sexual agency, but as Morris explained, they faced criticism for doing so.

    Many of Axell's works are self-portraits, though she often obscured her identity by signing only with her last name.

    “The feminist artists who emerged in the 1970s and into the 1980s and 90s were very much taken to task by orthodox feminism in relationship to them utilizing their own sexuality, their own bodies, their own beauty,” she said.

    Axell might have been part of this crucial wave; curators and scholars are still unpacking her prescient feminist ideas, and the paradisical world she set them in. Instead, she hid her identity, signing her works with only her last name, after facing derision from male art critics, according to the exhibition at Muzeum Susch. Her stylistic approach — a mix of pop art influences and dreamy surrealist settings — is still underrecognized, according to Morris.

    “She acts as a historical bridge (between surrealism and pop art),” she said. “And I think that that’s something that’s dramatically unexplored.”

    Axell experimented with materials, applying enamel paint to plexiglas to heighten the dreamlike qualities of her work, as in this painting,

    Skilled at challenging expectations around her own beauty, sexuality and sense of self in her work, Axell was also politically engaged, producing portraits of the African American activist Angela Davis and a painting responding to the Kent State campus shootings in 1970.

    “Despite all aggressiveness, my universe abounds above all in an unconditional love for life,” Axell said in her only interview in 1970, according to a publication by Muzeum Susch. “My subject is clear: nudity and femininity experiment in the utopia of a bio-botanical freedom; that means a freedom without frustration nor gradual submission, and that tolerates only the limits that it sets itself.”

    One of Morris’ favorite works, shown at the Brooklyn Museum, embodies this spirit: an abstracted view of a woman’s torso, the curves of her body like peaks and valleys, her vulva covered in a real tuffet of green fur. Called “Petite fourrure verte” or “Small green fur,” the intimate perspective was based on a photograph Axell’s filmmaker husband, Jean Antoine, had taken of her.

    “It’s from 1970, just a couple years before her death,” Morris said. “So for me, it really epitomizes what would have been — what was to come.”

    Top image: “Axell-ération” from 1965.

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  • Florida teacher says she is under investigation after showing 5th grade class Disney movie with gay character | CNN

    Florida teacher says she is under investigation after showing 5th grade class Disney movie with gay character | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A fifth-grade teacher said she is being investigated by the Florida Department of Education after she showed her students “Strange World,” a 2022 animated Disney movie featuring a character who is biracial and gay.

    Jenna Barbee is a teacher in Hernando County’s Winding Waters K-8 school. “I am the teacher that’s under investigation with the Florida Department of Education for indoctrination for showing a Disney movie,” Barbee said in a TikTok post over the weekend.

    In the post, Barbee explained she played the Disney movie to a class which was partially full after a day of standardized testing. She also said she had previously-signed permission slips from all the parents, allowing the students to watch a movie rated PG.

    According to Barbee, a parent then complained and reported her to the state Department of Education.

    The parent who reported her, who is also a member of the Hernando County School District Board, complained to the principal about the movie not being appropriate for students, according to Karen Jordan, spokesperson for Hernando County Schools. Jordan also provided CNN with a copy of the announcement from the school district to parents.

    “Yesterday, the Disney movie ‘Strange World’ was shown in your child’s classroom,” the school district said. “While not the main plot of the movie, parts of the story involves a male character having and expressing feelings for another male character. In the future, this movie will not be shown. The school administration and the district’s Professional Standards Dept is currently reviewing the matter to see if further corrective action is required.”

    The complaint is part of Florida’s controversial legislation, signed last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis, banning certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. DeSantis and other supporters pushed the measure as a form of “parental rights,” while opponents said it tried to erase LGBTQ people from schools and dubbed the law “Don’t Say Gay.”

    The law initially banned instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade or in a way deemed not age-appropriate for all other grades, but it has since been expanded to limit such information all through high school. Teachers who violate the state policy can be suspended or have their teaching licenses revoked.

    Disney was among those who spoke out against the law last year, spurring DeSantis and Florida Republicans to retaliate against the entertainment company by targeting their control over the land in and around its theme parks.

    The animated film “Strange World,” released last year, told the story of a family of explorers and starred the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Lucy Liu. The movie also featured Disney’s first-ever out-gay character, voiced by comedian Jaboukie Young-White.

    On May 9, Barbee addressed the school board members during public comment at a meeting. In attendance was the parent who had complained, school board member Shannon Rodriguez, she acknowledged during the meeting.

    “A school board member, an elected official of power, who was supposed to be nonpartisan, is allowed to present to the public that she is Christian and that God appointed her to the board. And yet it is indoctrinated that I showed a Disney movie. I’m a first-year teacher,” said Barbee.

    The teacher told district board members the movie was in no way sexual and was tied to the current lesson plan of the environment and ecosystems.

    Barbee claimed in the meeting Rodriguez “came to my school took me away from my students to tell me how bad and wrong I was.”

    At the end of the school board meeting, Rodriguez said she called the state department of education regarding the incident, which prompted the state investigation. She said her daughter is in Barbee’s class.

    She said at the district meeting Barbee broke school policy because she did not get the specific movie approved by school administration and said the teacher is “playing the victim.”

    “It is not a teacher’s job to impose their beliefs upon a child: religious, sexual orientation, gender identity, any of the above. But allowing movies such as this assist teachers in opening a door, and please hear me, they assist teachers in opening a door for conversations that have no place in our classrooms,” Rodriguez said.

    Rodriguez said “as a leader in this community, I’m not going to stand by and allow this minority to infiltrate our schools … God did put me here,” she said.

    CNN has reached out to Rodriguez and Hernando County School District and the Florida Department of Education for comment.

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  • Where to travel in 2023: The best destinations to visit | CNN

    Where to travel in 2023: The best destinations to visit | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    As peak vacation season sails into view and the world shakes off the last shackles of the pandemic, it feels like the appetite for hitting the road has never been greater.

    International tourism reached 80% of pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2023, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, with an estimated 235 million tourists traveling internationally in January, February and March. And experts are cautiously optimistic about a continued travel rebound.

    Demand is high, with many popular destinations booking out earlier in the year.

    Thankfully, there’s so much out there still to see and do.

    Travel expert explains why you should book your dream vacation now

    Here are 23 destination ideas from CNN Travel to get you started:

    From the main square in Krakow, pictured, to forests, lakes and mountains, Poland invites exploration.

    We could list new openings in Poland – such as Hotel Verte, the new Autograph Collection property in Warsaw, which threw open its gilded doors (it’s in a humongous Baroque palace) last August. But the reason you should visit Poland in 2023 isn’t for the chance to stay in a place fit for royalty. It’s to show solidarity with a country which has, in turn, shown solidarity to the people of Ukraine.

    Sharing a 300-plus-mile border with a country under attack has meant that Poland has taken in more Ukrainian refugees than anywhere else. Add to that plummeting tourist numbers (though they’re on the rise again), and you have a tricky situation.

    So whether you fancy that Warsaw palace, a city break to the likes of Krakow, Gdansk, Wrocław or Poznań – all hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian border – or to get away from it all in the forests, lakes and mountains of the countryside – now’s your chance to do some good by taking a vacation. – Julia Buckley

    A full solar eclipse will be visible in April in Exmouth, Western Australia. The landscape is worth a long look, too.

    Back in April, thousands of people descended on the town of Exmouth and the greater Ningaloo Peninsula, to witness a rare total solar eclipse as it became visible over the northwestern edge of Australia.

    Organizers spent more than a year planning for the event, which lasted about a minute, and featured musical performances, educational opportunities to learn about science and astronomy, and a three-day festival.

    But the state of Western Australia offers much more than some 60 seconds of wonder.

    Spanning one-third of the entire continent of Australia, it stretches from the lively, growing state capital of Perth across deserts including the Great Victoria and Great Sandy to the wine country of Margaret River, the dramatic clifftops of the Kimberley and the quokka-covered Rottnest Island. – Lilit Marcus

    Mersey paradise: Liverpool.

    England’s port city of Liverpool, best known around the world as the birthplace of The Beatles, has added another chapter to its musical legacy.

    It’s the host city of Eurovision 2023, the spangly extravaganza of song that brings an influx of thousands of flag-waving fans from across the continent. The annual event is an opportunity for the city to bounce back after the ignominy of being stripped of its UNESCO World Heritage status in 2021.

    In June, the city will celebrate 25 years of the Liverpool Biennial contemporary visual arts festival, as more than 30 international artists and collectives take over spaces in the city until September.

    England is also marking the Year of the Coast in 2023, with food festivals and beach cleans taking place along the country’s shores. Just a half hour from Liverpool city center by train, Crosby Beach is the permanent home of sculptor Antony Gormley’s “Another Place,” where 100 cast-iron figures stand facing out to sea. – Maureen O’Hare

    Charleston, a city of undeniable refined, historic beauty, is also looking more closely at its troubled past.

    Charleston parades its past like no other US city, but it often glossed over the history of its Black residents. It’s been taking steps to fix that.

    Enter the much-delayed International African American Museum, which is now expected to open in late June.

    Located on the shoreline of the Cooper River in the spot where many Africans first set foot in North America, it will explore the lives of slaves and their descendants.

    Visitors in late May and early June can enjoy the world-renowned Spoleto Festival featuring opera, theater, dance, musical acts and artist talks.

    In March, foodies headed to the Charleston Wine and Food Festival to sample Lowcountry favorites.

    For fancy Southern fare, try Magnolias. Opened in 1990, it helped spur the city’s culinary renaissance. For something informal, try Bertha’s Kitchen in North Charleston, where red rice with sausage, fried chicken and lima beans rule. The eatery even caught attention of “Roadfood” author Michael Stern. – Forrest Brown

    Self-effacing Vilnius admitted in an ad campaign this year that nobody really knows where it is. If their brilliant video didn’t make you want to book a trip there immediately, perhaps this will: the capital of Lithuania celebrated its 700th anniversary on January 25, 2023.

    To mark the milestone, a packed program of events, including music festivals and exhibitions, are being held throughout the year. But use the anniversary as a push to visit rather than following a program religiously.

    The entire city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – putting it up there with its fellow V-cities, Venice and Vienna. Vilnius makes it on the list thanks to its Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings, all sitting on a medieval street plan, but it’s best known for its Baroque architecture.

    Don’t miss the frothy bell tower of St. John’s church (you can climb it for sweeping city views) or the church of St. Casimir, topped by a giant crown. Got an eye for social media? This is Europe’s only capital city that allows hot air balloons to cruise over the city skyline. – JB

    Scenes like this await visitors to Fiji.

    Brilliant blue waters, expansive coral reefs and hundreds of peaceful islands: Fiji is not a hard sell. But why go there in 2023? For one, the country only reopened post-Covid at the end of 2021, meaning that visitor numbers to the South Pacific paradise have yet to fully rebound.

    While the country is spoiled for underwater beauty, take an opportunity to explore its above-ground treasures, too. The country’s lone UNESCO World Heritage site is the town of Levuka, a former capital and an important port, which is studded with British colonial-era buildings amid coconut and mango trees.

    To learn about the local Indigenous communities, travelers can take part in a kava welcoming ceremony – named for the traditional drink at its center – or enjoy a lovo, a meal cooked by hot coals in an underground pit covered with banana leaves.

    Fiji Airways now has direct flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco, making it relatively easy to get to the islands. As the Fijians say, bula! – LM

    As the fate of the Amazon rainforest hangs in the balance, two eco-lodges around Manaus – the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state, and gateway to the river – have used their pandemic pause to get even more environmentally friendly.

    Juma Amazon Lodge, about 50 miles south of the city, is now fully powered by a new $400,000 solar plant, whose 268 double panels swagger nearly 40 feet into the air above the canopy (meaning no trees had to be cut). They’ve also built a biogas system to increase the efficiency of organic waste treatment, reducing annual carbon emissions by eight tons.

    Meanwhile, Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, northwest of Manaus on the Rio Negro river, opened an off-grid “advanced base” during the pandemic that’s 30 miles from the main lodge and accessible only via river.

    Guests can take long jungle hikes through territory home to jaguars, pumas and giant armadillos in what’s one of the Amazon region’s most remote hotel facilities, then spend the afternoon in a hammock or by the pool. For 2023, the lodge is planning overnight stays in a creekside tent for small groups.

    Don’t miss Manaus itself – eating behemoth Amazonian fish outside the pink 1896 opera house is a bucket list experience. – JB

    Enticing flavors, history and proximity to beaches and mountains are just a few factors working in this Greek city's favor.

    There’s been no shortage of reasons to visit Greece’s second city in recent times, with a UNESCO-endorsed local food scene that recently celebrated the refurb and reopening of its century-old Modiano food market.

    Throw in a popular waterfront and proximity to beautiful beaches and inland mountains, Thessaloniki is surely a contender for one of Europe’s best city-break destinations.

    What could make it even better? How about a gleaming new metro system? All being well, November 2023 should see the opening of the main line of an infrastructure megaproject that will eventually connect the city’s downtown to its international airport. Driverless trains will whisk passengers through tunnels whose excavation has added to Thessaloniki’s already rich catalog of archeological discoveries, many of which will be on display in specially created museum stations. – Barry Neild

    January 2023 saw the official opening of Rwanda’s most exciting hotel yet: Sextantio Rwanda, a collection of traditionally crafted huts on an island on Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s largest lakes.

    It’s the first project outside Italy for Daniele Kihlgren, whose part-hotel, part-living history projects keep local tradition alive. A nonprofit delivering money straight to local communities, Sextantio sees guests fishing on the 1,000-square-mile lake, paddling in dug-out canoes, trying local banana beer and wildlife-spotting – and not just the chickens, cows, pigs and goats that roam around the property.

    Of course, you’ll want to see gorillas. Adjoining Volcanoes National Park, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund opened the 4,500-square meter Ellen DeGeneres Campus in 2022. Its visitor center includes exhibits, virtual reality gorilla “encounters” and nature trails.

    Over in Akagera National Park, white rhinos – transferred from South Africa in 2021 to aid conservation – are already calving. It’s easier to get there, too. A new route from London joins Brussels, Dubai, Guangzhou and Mumbai as the only direct flights to Kigali from outside the African continent. – JB

    Voted the world’s most sustainable destination in the world for six years running, Sweden’s second-biggest city is finally emerging from the shadow of Stockholm.

    Once a major trading and shipping town, Gothenburg is now considered to be one of the greenest destinations in Europe, with 274 square meters (2,950 square feet) of green space per citizen, while 95% of its hotels are certified as eco-friendly.

    Although Gothenburg officially turned 400 in 2021, the celebrations were put on ice because of the global pandemic. But they’re finally taking place in 2023, so it’s a great time to visit.

    Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustav, who celebrates 50 years on the throne this year, will be in town on June 4, Gothenburg’s official birthday, and the city’s major anniversary festival is being held in the Frihamnen port district from June 2 to 5, with concerts and art events among the activities on offer.

    The festivities will continue throughout the summer until the September 3 kick off of Göteborgsvarvet Marathon, a new 26-mile race following on from the city’s popular half marathon on May 13. – Tamara Hardingham-Gill

    The Dhayah Fort in Ras al-Khaimah is one of the few remaining hill forts in the United Arab Emirates.

    When travelers think of the United Arab Emirates, the dazzling skyline of Dubai is usually what springs to mind.

    But the UAE has a lot to offer nature lovers too – particularly the northernmost emirate Ras al-Khaimah, which is aiming to become the Middle East’s most sustainable destination by 2025 thanks to a new “Balanced Tourism” strategy.

    Just 45 minutes from Dubai, it’s often called the “adventure Emirate,” and for good reason. Offering beaches, deserts and mountains, outdoor attractions abound, such as sand boarding, trekking, wakeboarding, skydiving, scuba diving and even the world’s longest zipline.

    But it’s not all about the adrenaline rush. Ras Al Khaimah is where you’ll find the highest restaurant in the United Arab Emirates, 1484 by Puro, which sits in the emirate’s Jebel Jais Mountains. Culture seekers can head for the historic Dhayah Fort, which dates back to the Late Bronze Age (1600-1300 BC).

    Where to stay? Luxury hospitality brand Anantara is opening a fabulous new resort there later this year that will offer 174 guestrooms, suites and overwater villas along with specialty restaurants and a spa. – Karla Cripps

    Three-tiered Kuang Si Falls is just south of UNESCO-listed Luang Prabang.

    Sharing borders with Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Myanmar, landlocked Laos has long been a must-hit spot for time-rich travelers making their way through the Southeast Asia circuit.

    But now, thanks to the 2021 opening of a semi-high-speed railway, it’s easier than ever to get around the country at a quicker pace, shaving hours off journeys that previously took full days to travel.

    You’re still going to have to make some hard choices – there’s a lot to see in Laos.

    Towering karst peaks await visitors to adventure-haven Vang Vieng, while UNESCO-listed Luang Prabang is filled with French-colonial heritage, Buddhist ritual and natural beauty. (Luxury seekers will want to check into the Rosewood Luang Prabang, with its stylish hilltop tents)

    The mysterious Plain of Jars, a megalithic archaeological site, can be found in the Xiangkhoang Plateau. For a once-in-a-lifetime experience that makes a difference, head for Bokeo Province and join one of the Gibbon Experience’s overnight treks. Guests of this tourism-based conservation project spend the night in the world’s tallest treehouses – only accessible by zipline – among wild, black-crested gibbons. – KC

    Rolling hills, medieval buildings – and the officially crowned world’s best cheese. Welcome to Gruyères, Switzerland.

    Everywhere you look in this tiny, hilltop town, there’s a different picture-perfect view – from the medieval market square to the turreted 13th-century castle. A doable day trip from Geneva, summer promises hiking opportunities aplenty, while winter allows for venturing to the nearby Moléson-sur-Gruyères ski resort.

    To taste Gruyères’ namesake fromage, stop off at the wood-lined Chalet de Gruyères. And to learn how cheesemakers perfect this creamy goodness, head to La Maison du Gruyère factory. For further foodie delights, there’s the Maison Cailler chocolate factory – from the outside it looks like something from a Wes Anderson movie, inside it offers a glimpse into the secrets of Swiss chocolate making.

    Gruyères is also home to the surreal HR Giger Museum, celebrating the work of the acclaimed Swiss artist behind the eponymous alien in the 1979 movie “Alien.” A drink at the museum’s bar, designed by Giger in an eerie skeletal aesthetic, offers an antidote to Gruyères’ fairytale vibe. – Francesca Street

    A modern Indigenous restaurant in Minneapolis has earned one of the culinary world’s highest honors, and it’s not alone in shining light on Native communities in the area.

    At Owamni, a James Beard Award winner for best new restaurant, Indigenous ingredients – trout, bison, sweet potatoes and more – make up “decolonized” menus where ingredients such as wheat flour and beef are absent. The restaurant is a partnership between chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and Dana Thompson, who is a lineal descendant of the Wahpeton-Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota tribes.

    Earlier this year, one of the pair’s community-owned initiatives, Indigenous Food Lab, opened a market in Minneapolis’ Midtown Global Market, a former Sears building housing businesses that represent more than 22 cultures.

    The open-air Four Sisters Farmers Market (Thursdays June through October) also focuses on Indigenous products. And at the Minnesota History Center in neighboring St. Paul, the exhibit “Our Home: Native Minnesota” looks at thousands of years of Native history in the state. – Marnie Hunter

    While Colomia's busy capital can be congested, it's also home to the historic neighborhood of La Candelaria.

    Caribbean coast destinations such as the Rosario archipelago or the UNESCO heritage list city of Cartagena are rightly top of most Colombia travel wish lists, but also deserving a look-in is the country’s somewhat unsung capital of Bogotá.

    Yes, it’s a messy, traffic-snarled urban sprawl, but it’s also a high-altitude crucible of culture and cuisine. There are tours that chart the city’s transformation from graffiti wild west to incredible street art gallery.

    Equally colorful are the restaurants that make the most of Colombia’s diverse natural larder of flora on menus that range from delicious peasant dishes to mind-blowing Michelin-level gastronomy. And then there’s the coffee!

    The congestion (except on regular cycle-only days) thins quickly on its outskirts, allowing day trips to see historic and modern treasures. Itineraries include Lake Guatavita, where conquistadors once plundered sunken gold offerings left by indigenous Muisca people, or the majestic subterranean Zipaquirá salt cathedral. – BN

    Famed for its mountain treks through ancient trails that once facilitated trade between the Himalayas and India, Nepal’s stunning Mustang Valley sits on the doorstep of Tibet.

    Expect to hear a lot more about this remote destination in the coming months thanks to the arrival of the soon-to-open Shinta Mani Mustang. Part of the Bensley Collection, this all-inclusive resort perched above the small town of Jomsom in the Lower Mustang will offer luxury seekers 29 suites inspired by traditional Tibetan homes.

    In addition to trekking, Mustang visitors can explore ancient villages and Buddhist monasteries. Also not to be missed, the man-made Mustang Caves sit above the Gandaki River and are filled with 2,000-year-old Buddhist sculptures and paintings.

    Getting to the Mustang Valley is part of the adventure. Travelers will need to take a 25-minute flight from capital Kathmandu to Pokhara then hop on another plane for the 20-minute journey to Jomsom. The views alone might make this option more pleasing to some than the alternative – a 12-hour drive from Kathmandu. – KC

    From the spectacular wildlife to the beautiful national parks and beaches, Tanzania is absolutely bursting with visual splendor.

    The East African country holds a seemingly endless list of incredible sights, with Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, UNESCO world heritage site Serengeti National Park, and the Zanzibar Archipelago, among its many highlights.

    This year, flag carrier Air Tanzania will launch new routes to West and Central Africa, along with the UK, in a bid to transform the country’s largest airport in Dar es Salaam into a transport and logistics hub, while construction on the country’s first toll expressway is also scheduled to begin.

    Meanwhile, the Delta Hotels by Marriott brand made its Africa debut with the opening of its Dar es Salaam Oyster Bay property earlier this year. –– THG

    Cairo is pulsing with life and a rich blend of cultures.

    Could this finally be the year tourists can see the Grand Egyptian Museum? After delay upon delay, the museum is expecting a 2023 opening.

    GEM will be the largest museum dedicated to a single civilization, costing around $1 billion and holding the entire King Tut collection. See video here of a CNN insider visit.

    If you arrive in Cairo before it opens, the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square can still scratch your antiquity itch.

    While the Pyramids of Giza are the city’s tour-de-force, there’s still more to see. Start with Islamic Cairo. This area has one of the largest collections of historic Islamic architecture in the world. While there, visit the Al-Azhar mosque, which dates back to 970.

    The city also has a rich Christian tradition. Coptic Cairo, part of Old Cairo, has a concentration of Christian sites that pre-date the arrival of Islam.

    If you need a respite from Cairo’s cacophony, Al Azhar Park has a nice expanse of greenery and a design inspired by historic Islamic gardens. And the affluent neighborhood of Zamalek, which sits on an island in the Nile River, serves up restaurants, antique stores and swanky hotels. – FB

    Yayoi Kusama has the distinction of being the best-selling living female artist on the planet. In particular, she has become a global icon for her sculptures of giant polka-dotted pumpkins, one of which was reinstalled at the pier of Naoshima, one of Japan’s “art islands,” in 2022 after being swept into the sea the year before.

    However, Naoshima is so much more than its famous yellow gourd or its works by Kusama.

    There are five small, walkable “art islands” in the Seto Inland Sea, which is located between the main islands of Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku in southeastern Japan. The largest collection of things to see – not to mention the only hotel – is on Naoshima. Together, the five champion modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on Japanese artists.

    Don’t come here expecting calligraphy and other classical forms. Instead, be awed by Tadao Ando’s massive stone monoliths, a tiny gallery where patrons can listen to nothing but the beats of human hearts, a makeshift thunderstorm created inside a wooden house and an exhibit where jumping in and taking a bath is intended to be part of the artistic experience. – LM

    With direct flights to Belize City from about a dozen North American airports, this Central American country is a low-hassle hop for many travelers during the November to April high season.

    Most visitors head directly to Belize’s Caribbean coastline. The country’s largest island, Ambergris Caye, sits next to Belize Barrier Reef – the world’s second largest coral reef system. Margaritaville Beach Resort opened on the island in March, and “eco-luxury” resort Alaia Belize opened in 2021.

    Farther south, the Great Blue Hole – a massive underwater sinkhole – is an aquatic magnet for both scuba divers and aerial photographers.

    But Belize offers way more than its enticing islands.

    Lush rainforests, cave networks, winding rivers and rich Mayan archaeological sites invite exploration in a country that’s had an evolving sustainable tourism master plan since 2012. Ruins of the Mayan city of Altun Ha are just about an hour north of Belize City. Or farther west, Lamanai is one of Belize’s largest and most fascinating Mayan sites. – MH

    Mexico is arguably as rich in culinary heritage as it is in Mesoamerican archaeological treasures, and Eva Longoria explores many distinctive flavors in her series “Searching for Mexico,” which aired on CNN this year.

    The state of Oaxaca, which Longoria visits, has an especially deep well of culinary traditions. Plus, Oaxaca produces most of the world’s mezcal.

    Tlayudas, known as Oaxacan pizzas, are a street food staple. A large corn tortilla is typically layered with lard, beans, traditional Oaxacan cheese, pork and other toppings such as avocado and tomato. The state is also renowned for its seven mole sauces, with recipes that may call for dozens of ingredients from chiles and sesame seeds to chocolate and dried fruit.

    In the city of Oaxaca, Mercado Benito Juárez is one of many markets across the state selling items such as dried chiles, fresh produce, handicrafts and crunchy grasshoppers. To sample the state’s increasingly popular beverage, the town of Santiago Matatlán is the place for mezcal distillery tours and tastings. – MH

    In the winter, the frozen Rideau Canal in Ottawa becomes the world's largest skaing rink.

    It doesn’t have Montreal’s French flair or Toronto’s international oomph, so the Canadian capital can get overlooked. That would be a mistake. Graceful and understated, Ottawa has its own draws.

    Music lovers should take note of two Ottawa Jazz Festivals. The winter edition took place in February, and the summer edition will run from June 23-30.

    If you love hockey, watch the Ottawa Senators do their NHL thing at the Canadian Tire Centre in the western suburbs. If that ticket is too pricey, check out the Ottawa 67’s, a more affordable option of junior men’s hockey games at downtown’s TD Place Arena.

    The Rideau Canal turns into the world’s largest skating rink from sometime in January to late February or early March, depending on ice thickness. It’s free and accessible 24/7. When it’s warmer, it’s a great spot for people and boat watching.

    A don’t-miss is Parliament Hill, home to Canada’s federal government and the visually striking Parliament buildings on a promontory overlooking the Ottawa River. – FB

    Treks through the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest are among Uganda's highlights.

    There’s considerable change brewing in Uganda’s travel offerings at the moment with the East African country looking beyond the traditional staples of safari and wildlife spotting to appeal to both regional and international visitors.

    Keen to revitalize post-Covid tourism in all corners of the country, not just the big-ticket businesses offering wealthy visitors a glimpse of the Big Five beasts or mountain gorillas, it’s turned to marketing its other attributes.

    And why not? From the expansive shores of Lake Victoria to the snowy Rwenzori Mountains, Uganda is a beautiful wilderness playground, with opportunities for adventure including treks through the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest or up to the craters of the Virunga volcano chain or whitewater rafting along the Victoria Nile.

    There’s also an emphasis on connecting visitors with Ugandan communities – promising tastes of Ugandan food, music and culture. Last year saw the launch of the Uganda Cycling Trail, a 1,600-kilometer mainly unpaved 22-stage route designed to appeal to all levels of cyclist from hardcore solo bikepackers to fully-guided easy riders. – BN

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  • The agony and ecstasy of scoring last-minute face value Taylor Swift tickets | CNN Business

    The agony and ecstasy of scoring last-minute face value Taylor Swift tickets | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    When Julia Thomas woke up at her home in Cleveland last Saturday, she spontaneously decided to drive 15 hours to the Taylor Swift concert that night in Nashville, picking up her sister in Cincinnati along the way. But they were missing one thing: tickets.

    Like so many Swift fans, she couldn’t get tickets on Ticketmaster when they went on sale last fall, nor could she afford the four-figure price tag listed for them on resale sites. About halfway through the drive, however, her sister found $350 floor seats after refreshing various Swift-focused Twitter accounts: Ticketmaster had just dropped a handful of last-minute tickets at face value on its website.

    “We seriously just got super lucky,” she told CNN. “We made it to Nashville with about an hour to spare before the concert started.”

    Thomas is one of many devoted fans who closely monitor a mix of Twitter accounts dedicated to alerting fans when Ticketmaster releases a new batch of Swift tickets after the initial sale.

    Ticket drops are not new. They’re ostensibly due to additional seats being added to a venue, or if tickets are returned. But these drops have become an obsession among Swift’s most devoted fans, who are struggling to find tickets for the artist in the face of Ticketmaster’s broader ticketing snafus.

    Ticketmaster has been under scrutiny for fumbling the online sales to the mega-star’s latest tour, in an era where it already completely dominates the live event industry, leaving few, if any, alternatives. In November, “Verified Fans” were sent a presale code — but when sales began, heavy demand snarled the website and millions of Swifties could not get their hands on a ticket. Presale tickets for Capital One card holders brought similar frustration — and then Ticketmaster canceled sales to the general public, citing “extraordinarily high demand” and “insufficient remaining ticket inventory.”

    In testimony before Congress, Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation President and CFO Joe Berchtold partly blamed the ticketing incident on bots. He also emphasized that Ticketmaster does not set ticket prices, does not determine the number of tickets put up for sale and that “in most cases, venues set service and ticketing fees,” not Ticketmaster.

    Ticketmaster and Live Nation are currently face a lawsuit from Swift fans across the country for “unlawful conduct,” with the plaintiffs claiming the ticketing giant violated antitrust laws, among others. A preliminary hearing was held in March; Ticketmaster has denied the allegations.

    Millions of fans are still unable to buy tickets. In recent weeks, however, Ticketmaster has been sending out more Verified Fan codes to people who were originally selected from the pre-sale to purchase from leftover tickets. For people without codes, Ticketmaster is also doing routine ticket drops ahead of shows.

    It’s not unusual, however, that thousands of fans are trying to secure the same tickets at the same time. Sometimes the seats are purchased by bots and scalpers, and reposted to third-party sites like StubHub within minutes.

    Ticketmaster did not respond to a request for comment about its ticket drops.

    But that’s not deterring Swift fans. Some are spending hours searching for tickets online and driving long distances to concert venues without a ticket in hand, even if it risks ending in heartbreak.

    Molly Ramsey, an 18-year-old fan from Bristol, Tennessee, said she recently stumbled across the Twitter account @erastourticks, which often tweets about Ticketmaster’s drops. “My family [last weekend] took the gamble to drive down the 5 hours to Nashville to see if we could get face value tickets,” she said.

    After nearly nine hours of refreshing Ticketmaster, she secured four tickets right before the show started. “We were sitting outside of the stadium while the openers were playing, but as soon as our payment went through, it was an out-of-body experience,” she said. “My sister started screaming and dancing.”

    In a nod to Swift’s hit song “Anti-Hero” and the rush to find drop tickets, the Twitter account – which has about 22,000 followers – recently tweeted: “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero aka @Ticketmaster.”

    Molly Ramsey, left, and her sister score last-minute Taylor Swift concert tickets

    A similar site, @concertleaks, has been connecting its 62,000 followers to last-minute Swift tickets. The account was originally set up years ago to post concert setlists, merchandise, and tickets for various artists, but has evolved to help connect followers with ticket drops, too.

    Another Twitter account called @ErasTourResell, which has 120,000 followers, has gained significant traction working with resellers who want to sell their tickets at face value. The account is run by longtime friends Courtney Johnston, Channette Garay and Angel Richards. The trio of twenty-somethings aim to make Swift tickets as accessible to fans as possible without them overpaying or getting scammed.

    “So far we’ve posted somewhere between 2,700 and 3,000 tickets, all for face value,” the trio said in a DM conversation on Twitter. “It’s truly so rewarding seeing these tickets go to real fans for face value when the resale market has insane prices with people making three times the profit. It’s also been amazing to meet people who follow the account at shows, especially if the only reason they were even able to attend was through our account.”

    They spend hours, in between working and going to school, sifting through daily submissions to make sure the tickets are real. The group encourages buyers to ask for video proof of tickets, to pay only via Paypal Goods and Services due to its protection plan and to never pay over the face value. (They also said they don’t make any money off the process, and do it only to help fellow Swifties, but they do have a Ko-Fi account where people can donate funds for food or coffee).

    “Surprisingly, the vetting process has gone immensely well and smoothly because by now we know what a sketchy screen recording looks like or what a forged or hacked email can look like,” the group said. “It’s all about being able to catch the super small details – what color an image is supposed to look like, what link is clickable, where that link has to take you, what message is supposed to pop up at any certain point.”

    But getting these tickets isn’t easy. After an alert for tickets is posted to their Twitter page, many users say they never hear back from sellers, and it’s unclear how they select a buyer from the hundreds of fans who reach out to them.

    “It has definitely gotten harder with our amount of followers increasing,” the friends behind @ErasTourResell told CNN. “Some [sellers pick] based off of the first direct message and mention, and others go for someone with a touching story so it truly varies. Having our notifications on helps as we tend to do a little warning and tease before posting most tickets.”

    Beyond Twitter, many fans are turning to sites such as Reddit, including the R/Taylor Swift page, for play-by-play details on Ticketmaster drops. Some say they’ve spotted them several times throughout the day but most frequently about 30 minutes before a show starts. (Tickets have even appeared an hour into the show.) Others suggest using Apple Pay to expedite the payment process and avoid losing tickets while typing in credit card information.

    Despite these massive efforts, not all fans find luck online.

    Katy Blackman, 33, from Birmingham, Alabama, said she spent all day in a Nashville hotel last weekend refreshing the site. Only once did she manage to get a single ticket into her online shopping cart, but it was gone before she could check out.

    Katy Blackman spent all day in her hotel room refreshing Ticketmaster looking for same-day Taylor Swift ticket

    Still, she headed to Nissan Stadium that night and stood in the parking lot alongside hundreds of other fans without tickets trying to get in. When the lights dimmed minutes before Swift took the stage, the crowds scattered; she was nearly the only one left, still refreshing Ticketmaster.

    “All my searching and combing Ticketmaster and resell sites was worthless,” she said. “But then all of a sudden, a random girl came running up to me truly seconds before she came on and said, “Hey, wanna come in with me?”

    The stranger had just scored last-minute tickets and had an extra to sell. “A miracle happened,” Blackman said. “My new friend and I sang every single song. We cried, danced, hugged. It was worth the absolute hell to get there.”

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  • Mysterious rumblings were recorded in Earth’s stratosphere | CNN

    Mysterious rumblings were recorded in Earth’s stratosphere | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Giant solar balloons were sent 70,000 feet up in the air to record sounds of Earth’s stratosphere — and the microphones picked up some unexpected sounds.

    The stratosphere is the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, and its lower level contains the ozone layer that absorbs and scatters the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, according to NASA. The thin, dry air of the stratosphere is where jet aircraft and weather balloons reach their maximum altitude, and the relatively calm atmospheric layer is rarely disturbed by turbulence.

    Daniel Bowman, principal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, was inspired in graduate school to explore the soundscape of the stratosphere after being introduced to the low-frequency sounds that are generated by volcanoes. Known as infrasound, the phenomenon is inaudible to the human ear.

    Bowman and his friends had previously flown cameras on weather balloons “to take pictures of the black sky above and the Earth far below” and successfully built their own solar balloon.

    He proposed attaching infrasound recorders to balloons to record the sounds of volcanoes. But then he and his adviser Jonathan Lees of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “realized that no one had tried to put microphones on stratospheric balloons for half a century, so we pivoted to exploring what this new platform could do,” Bowman said. Lees is a professor of Earth, marine and environmental sciences who researches seismology and volcanology.

    The balloons can take sensors twice as high as commercial jets can fly.

    “On our solar balloons, we have recorded surface and buried chemical explosions, thunder, ocean waves colliding, propeller aircraft, city sounds, suborbital rocket launches, earthquakes, and maybe even freight trains and jet aircraft,” Bowman said via email. “We’ve also recorded sounds whose origin is unclear.”

    The findings were shared Thursday at the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Chicago.

    A recording shared by Bowman from a NASA balloon that circled Antarctica contains infrasound of colliding ocean waves, which sounds like continual sighing. But other crackles and rustling have unknown origins.

    Listen to the sounds of the stratosphere

    Solar balloons captured a multitude of sounds in the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, including colliding ocean waves — as well as sounds with unidentified origins.

    Source: Daniel Bowman/Sandia National Laboratories

    In the stratosphere, “there are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour on some flights, but the source of these is completely unknown,” Bowman said.

    Bowman and his collaborators have conducted research using NASA balloons and other flight providers, but they decided to build their own balloons, each spanning about 19.7 to 23 feet (6 to 7 meters) across.

    The supplies can be found at hardware and pyrotechnic supply stores, and the balloons can be assembled on a basketball court.

    “Each balloon is made of painter’s plastic, shipping tape, and charcoal dust,” Bowman said via email. “They cost about $50 to make and a team of two can build one in about 3.5 hours. One simply brings it out to a field on a sunny day and fills it up with air, and it will carry a pound of payload to about 70,000 ft.”

    The charcoal dust is used inside the balloons to darken them, and when the sun shines on the dark balloons, the air inside them warms up and becomes buoyant. The inexpensive and easy DIY design means the researchers can release multiple balloons to collect as much data as possible.

    “Really, a group of high schoolers with access to the school gym could build a solar balloon, and there’s even a cellphone app called RedVox that can record infrasound,” Bowman said.

    Bowman estimated that he launched several dozen solar balloons to collect infrasound recordings between 2016 and April of this year. Microbarometers, originally designed to monitor volcanoes, were attached to the balloons to record low-frequency sounds.

    The researchers tracked their balloons using GPS, since they can travel for hundreds of miles and land in inconvenient locations.

    The longest flight so far was 44 days aboard a NASA helium balloon, which recorded 19 days worth of data before the batteries on the microphone died. Meanwhile, solar balloon flights tend to last about 14 hours during the summer and land once the sun sets.

    The advantage of the high altitude reached by the balloons means that noise levels are lower and the detection range is increased — and the whole Earth is accessible. But the balloons also present challenges for researchers. The stratosphere is a harsh environment with wild temperature fluctuations between heat and cold.

    “Solar balloons are a bit sluggish, and we’ve wrecked a few on bushes when trying to launch them,” Bowman said. “We’ve had to hike down into canyons and across mountains to get our payloads. Once, our Oklahoma State colleagues actually had a balloon land in a field, spend the night, and launch itself back in the air to fly another whole day!”

    Lessons learned from multiple balloon flights have somewhat eased the process, but now the greatest challenge for researchers is identifying the signals recorded during the flights.

    “There are many flights with signals whose origin we do not understand,” Bowman said. “They are almost certainly mundane, maybe a patch of turbulence, a distant severe storm, or some sort of human object like a freight train — but it’s hard to tell what is going on sometimes due to the lack of data up there.”

    Sarah Albert, a geophysicist at Sandia National Laboratories, has investigated a “sound channel” — a conduit that carries sounds across great distances through the atmosphere — located at the altitudes Bowman studies. Her recordings have captured rocket launches and other unidentified rumblings.

    Sandia National Laboratories geophysicists (from left) Daniel Bowman and Sarah Albert display an infrasound sensor and the box used to protect the sensors from extreme temperatures.

    “It may be that sound gets trapped in the channel and echoes around until it’s completely garbled,” Bowman said. “But whether it is near and fairly quiet (like a patch of turbulence) or distant and loud (like a faraway storm) is not clear yet.”

    Bowman and Albert will continue to investigate the aerial sound channel and try to determine where the stratosphere’s rumbles are originating — and why some flights record them while others don’t.

    Bowman is eager to understand the soundscape of the stratosphere and unlock key features, like variability across seasons and locations.

    It’s possible that helium-filled versions of these balloons could one day be used to explore other planets like Venus, carrying scientific instruments above or within the planet’s clouds for a few days as a test flight for larger, more complex missions.

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  • Lachlan Murdoch: No change in strategy at Fox News | CNN Business

    Lachlan Murdoch: No change in strategy at Fox News | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Despite a turbulent and expensive few weeks, Fox News isn’t changing course.

    Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said there will be no change in strategy at the company’s top rated cable news network, despite the firing of its top rated anchor Tucker Carlson and a massive $787.5 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems that resulted in the company swinging to a loss in the just completed period.

    “There is no change to our programming strategy at Fox News,” Murdoch said in response to an analyst who asked about Carlson’s ouster during the investor call Tuesday to discuss its financial results.

    Murdoch described Fox News as “obviously a successful” and suggested Carlson’s firing was a tweaking of its strategy, not a departure from it.

    “As always, we are adjusting our programming and lineup and that is what we continue to do,” Murdoch said.

    His comments came after the company reported a $50 million net loss for the just completed quarter, compared to $290 million in profit a year earlier.

    The reason was a $719 million charge including the cost of the Dominion settlement, other legal settlements related to its news division and other legal costs, including attorney fees, which was partly offset by equity earnings of it affiliates and a change in the market value of some of its investments.

    The earnings statement didn’t mention Dominion Voting Systems, although it does refer to charges related to legal settlement costs at Fox News Media. On the company’s call with investors Murdoch referred to the settlement with Dominion as in the best interest of the company and its shareholders, given rulings by the Delaware court that he said limited its defense. He said going to trial could have led to two to three years of appeals.

    “We’re proud of our Fox News team, the exceptional quality of their journalism and their stewardship of the Fox News brand,” he said. “So as we look ahead, we are confident in the strength of the Fox brands and the strength of our balance sheet.”

    And he again defended the company’s post-election coverage of the false conspiracy theories made against Dominion, even though internal communications among Fox anchors made public during the discovery process showed many of them didn’t believe the claims being made.

    “We always acted as a news organization reporting on the newsworthy events of the day,” Murdoch told investors Tuesday. “Now we have been and remain confident in the merits of our position that the first amendment protects a news organization’s reporting and allegations being made by a sitting president of the United States. However, the Delaware court severely limited our defenses and trial through pre-trial rulings.”

    Fox did not have to apologize or admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement in Dominion’s defamation suit against it, although its statement did say it acknowledged “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

    Fox still faces a lawsuit from another voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Murdoch told investors that case is “fundamentally different” from the Dominion case and that Fox will have greater defenses available to it than in the Delaware court hearing the Dominion case. He predicted that case won’t go to trial until 2025.

    The Dominion settlement was reached on April 18, but it was still reported in Fox’s fiscal third quarter, which concluded March 31. Excluding the legal costs and other special items reported Tuesday, it was a pretty good financial quarter for Fox.

    It reported adjusted earnings of $494 million, or 94 cents a share, up from $459 million a year earlier. That was better than the 87 cents a share forecast by analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. The company was helped by the profits and revenue gain it received from airing this year’s Super Bowl.

    Revenue at the company rose 18% to $4.1 billion, slightly higher than analysts’ forecasts. Most of that gain was due to a 43% surge in advertising revenue, helped greatly by $650 million in Super Bowl ads. Fox did not broadcast the Super Bowl in 2022.

    Fox had plenty of money available to pay the settlement. It said it had $4.1 billion in cash and cash equivalent on hand as of March 30, about three weeks before the settlement was reached. It also announced it repurchased $1.8 billion of its shares in the nine months ending March 31, as part of a $7 billion share repurchase plan. So far, Fox has repurchased $4.4 billion worth of shares as part of its plan.

    Murdoch said Fox is better positioned than many other media companies to ride out the delays and lost revenue that could take place from a prolonged strike by the Writers Guild of America. Some programming, such as late night shows, have already gone dark due to the strike that started last week, and production on other shows has been halted.

    But Murdoch said the fact that Fox has more of its revenue and profit coming from sports and news, which are not affected by the strike, puts it in a better position.

    “Our healthy balance of scripted and unscripted content on the network puts us in a tremendous position,” he said.

    The hit from the settlement was well known by investors ahead of the report. But even with the better than expected results, Fox

    (FOX)     shares were up only about 1% in trading at the market open following the report.

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  • Jennifer Coolidge shows support for writers’ strike in MTV Movie & TV Awards acceptance speech | CNN

    Jennifer Coolidge shows support for writers’ strike in MTV Movie & TV Awards acceptance speech | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Jennifer Coolidge loves two things: popcorn and screenwriters.

    Coolidge made this clear in a pre-recorded speech shown during Sunday’s MTV Movie & TV Awards broadcast, where the “White Lotus” star accepted a special Comedic Genius award.

    After commenting on the irony that the golden popcorn statuette is that of her favorite food (she was later seen snacking on some real popcorn while accepting another award for best frightened performance), Coolidge showed some love to the members of the Writers Guild of America, who are currently on strike.

    “Almost all great comedy starts with great writers and I just think that as a proud member of SAG (the Screen Actors Guild), I stand here before you tonight side by side with my sisters and brothers from the WGA that are fighting right now, fighting for the rights of artists everywhere,” Coolidge said.

    She went to quote William Shakespeare, saying, “the play is the thing.”

    “I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think it’s EVERYTHING,” she concluded, before breaking out in a dance while “Jump Around” by House of Pain played in the background.

    Joseph Quinn, who won best breakthrough performance for his role of Eddie Munson in Season 4 of “Stranger Things,” also referenced the ongoing strike, saying in his pre-recorded speech, “being a writer is a hard job, and it deserves respect.”

    Pedro Pascal gave a shout-out to writers as well, while accepting the best show award for “The Last of Us” on behalf of showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. “We’re standing in solidarity with the WGA that is fighting very hard for fair wages,” he said.

    Members of the WGA began picketing on May 2 after the guild and the major studios and streamers failed to reach a deal on a new contract. The strike has already affected numerous productions, including the MTV Movie & TV Awards itself.

    Drew Barrymore stepped down from her hosting duties to support the writers, and a pre-taped broadcast aired instead of what was supposed to be a live show after the WGA West announced plans to picket outside the Los Angeles event venue. Pre-recorded bits featuring Barrymore and pre-taped speeches by winners were aired, with clips of past MTV Movie & TV Award moments filling the space in between award handouts.

    Other productions impacted by the strike include all of the network late night shows, which went dark on Tuesday as the strike began, along with “Saturday Night Live,” which canceled this weekend’s show that would’ve seen alum Pete Davidson returning as host.

    Netflix’s “Stranger Things” also announced on Saturday that they’ve halted production on Season 5 due to the strike, further delaying the highly anticipated final season.

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  • Why is ‘Saturday Night Live’ not new tonight? | CNN

    Why is ‘Saturday Night Live’ not new tonight? | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Due to the continued film and TV writers’ strike, “Saturday Night Live” will not air a new episode on Saturday evening, as originally planned.

    Former cast member Pete Davidson was set to return as host for the long-running NBC comedy sketch show, along with musical guest Lil Uzi Vert.

    Davidson was seen on Saturday morning in a video on social media handing out pizza to striking writers in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

    “Gotta support the writers, man!” Davidson is heard saying in the brief clip. “No writers, no shows without the writers.”

    NBC announced the cancellation of new episodes going forward on Tuesday. A rerun from March 11, featuring Jenna Ortega as host and The 1975 as musical guest, will air on Saturday instead.

    Preparation for the new episode featuring Davidson was halted when the Writers Guild of America called for a strike on Monday, after failing to reach an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers when the WGA’s current contract expired just before midnight.

    Other late night network programs, including “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “The Tonight Show” have also gone dark due to the strike.

    A writers’ strike could shut down production on most television shows and cause a domino effect in the wider realm of the entertainment industry, pushing back the return of many programs set for the fall.

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  • 5 things to know for May 3: Border, Texas shooting, Writers strike, Fed meeting, Sudan | CNN

    5 things to know for May 3: Border, Texas shooting, Writers strike, Fed meeting, Sudan | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Many airline employees have gone for years without pay raises, even after enduring difficult working conditions during the pandemic. Pilots for American Airlines voted to strike this week, and Southwest pilots plan to vote as well, but they won’t be walking off the job anytime soon — if at all — due to a labor law that places considerable hurdles in the way of any union that wants to strike.

    Here’s what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.

    (You can get “CNN’s 5 Things” delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.)

    In preparation for an expected surge of crossings at the US-Mexico border next week, the Biden administration plans to send an additional 1,500 active-duty troops to the border to free up Department of Homeland Security agents. The troops will take on strictly administrative roles, officials said, and will join around 2,500 National Guard troops already in place. The surge of migrants is expected because Title 42, the Trump-era policy that allowed authorities to quickly turn away certain migrants at the border during the pandemic, expires on May 11. Encounters between border agents and undocumented immigrants are at around 7,000 per day at the moment and are expected to rise dramatically next week, despite a warning from the State Department and DHS about a new, more punitive policy related to border crossings.

    The man suspected of gunning down five people at a neighbor’s home in Texas last week — including a mother and her 9-year-old son — was captured Tuesday after a dayslong manhunt. The suspect was found under a pile of laundry in the closet of a home just miles from the Cleveland, Texas, residence where the shooting took place, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said. “We just want to thank the person who had the courage and bravery to call in the suspect’s location,” an FBI spokesperson said, adding that authorities are now investigating whether the suspect had any help in hiding. The gunman will be held on five counts of murder and his bond is set at $5 million.

    Official describes suspect found hiding in laundry

    Popular late night shows are airing repeat episodes “until further notice” due to the film and TV writers’ strike, sources tell CNN. Several shows including “Saturday Night Live,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” began airing repeat episodes as of Tuesday. Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, who host NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “The Tonight Show,” respectively, previously said they would honor the strike and not air any new episodes as well. Late night shows are being especially impacted because they depend on their writers for bits, monologues and celebrity interview questions. Until an agreement is reached, analysts say the strike could shut down production on shows and cause a domino effect in the wider realm of the entertainment industry, pushing back the return of many programs set for the fall.

    exp TSR.Todd.writers.guild.strike.impacts.tv.movies_00003201.png

    Strike means TV shows and films in jeopardy

    Federal Reserve officials are expected to raise interest rates by a quarter point today. The Fed’s decision comes just two days after the collapse of First Republic Bank, the second-biggest bank failure in US history. When the Fed raises interest rates, banks need to raise the rates on their savings accounts in order to lure depositors from their competitors. That can put a disproportionate amount of pressure on mid-sized and regional banks — like the ones who saw depositors pull their money when the banking crisis began in March. Still, the Fed will move to raise interest rates today to lower inflation. To do that, it has to intentionally slow parts of the economy by making it more expensive for banks, and thereby consumers, to borrow money.

    Leaders of Sudan’s warring factions agreed to a seven-day ceasefire on Tuesday, the foreign ministry of South Sudan said in a statement. However, previous ceasefires have failed to quell the fighting between the rival factions in various parts of the country. Both sides — the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces — have yet to comment on the report on their official channels. Tuesday’s announcement came after the UN’s refugee agency warned more than 800,000 people may flee to neighboring countries, as the ongoing violence blocks evacuation convoys from key ports in Sudan. More than 70,000 people have already fled Sudan to neighboring countries, a spokesperson for the agency said earlier this week.

    exp sudan ceasefire madowo FST 050312ASEG1 cnni world_00002001.png

    Seven-day ceasefire expected to begin Thursday in Sudan

    Teenage boy opens fire at Serbian school, killing eight children and a security guard, officials say

    Eight children and a security guard have have been killed after a 14-year-old boy allegedly opened fire in an elementary school in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, according to Serbia’s Interior Ministry. Several children and a teacher were also injured in the attack, officials said. The boy is in custody following the incident. 

    Cockroach at the Met Gala goes viral

    A bug on the red carpet received more buzz than some A-list celebrities. Watch the video here.

    Top 10 best cuisines in the world, according to CNN Travel

    Check out this list of appetizing cuisines. *Stomach rumbles — loudly* 

    NBA announces Most Valuable Player for 2022-2023

    Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers won the coveted award after the center topped the charts last year.

    Webb telescope detects mysterious water vapor in a nearby star system

    Astronomers detected water vapor around a rocky exoplanet located 26 light-years away from Earth. Here’s what it could mean.

    Kevin Costner and wife Christine Baumgartner are getting a divorce

    After more than 18 years, the two are going their separate ways.

    0

    That’s how many criminal charges, or lack thereof, will be filed against one of the former Memphis police officers involved in the fatal traffic stop that led to Tyre Nichols’ death. On January 7, 29-year-old Nichols, a Black man, was repeatedly punched and kicked by Memphis police officers following a traffic stop and brief foot chase. Former White Memphis police officer Preston Hemphill was part of the initial traffic stop in which bodycam footage revealed he used an “assaultive statement” after firing a stun gun at Nichols. Hemphill was not involved in the second encounter where Nichols was brutally beaten by police.

    “The public shouldn’t have their daily lives ruined by so-called ‘eco-warriors’ causing disruption.”

    — UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, issuing a statement Tuesday on the government’s plan to take stronger action against peaceful protesters, days ahead of the coronation of King Charles III. The Home Office said parts of a controversial law will go into place today that will “give police the powers to prevent disruption at major sporting and cultural events.” For example, protestors who physically attach themselves to things like buildings could receive a six-month prison sentence or “unlimited fine,” the Home Office said in a statement.

    Check your local forecast here>>>

    Teen’s grand entrance steals the show at prom

    Most teenagers favor limousines and luxury cars for their prom transportation. These high school students, on the other hand, preferred a tank for their grand entrance. (Click here to view) 

    Tank To Prom 1

    Teen’s grand entrance steals the show at prom

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  • A man is fatally shot near a popular New Orleans restaurant on first day of Jazz Fest | CNN

    A man is fatally shot near a popular New Orleans restaurant on first day of Jazz Fest | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A man was fatally shot and a woman wounded Friday night outside a New Orleans restaurant near the annual Jazz Fest, which started Friday.

    Officers responded to a call of shots being fired in the 3800 block of Canal Street about 8:20 p.m., the New Orleans Police Department said in a news release.

    They found a man dead at the scene near Mandina’s Restaurant, a 90-year-old institution. A woman was taken to a hospital where she was in stable condition, police said.

    A Mandina’s customer texted CNN affiliate WDSU that everyone inside dropped to the floor as gunshots were heard.

    A woman on the streetcar at the time told WDSU the streetcar was stopped and police told everyone to get off but did not say why.

    Customers left the restaurant after a 90-minute lockdown, the station reported.

    CNN has reached out to the restaurant. It has drawn generations of locals and visitors and is known for its Creole-Italian food and casual atmosphere, said Times-Picayune restaurant writer Ian McNulty, who lives in the area.

    “The neighborhood comes alive during Jazz Fest,” he said. “It would be busy on any Friday night, but especially after Jazz Fest.”

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  • Wrexham: An intoxicating tale of Hollywood glamor and sporting romance | CNN

    Wrexham: An intoxicating tale of Hollywood glamor and sporting romance | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    “It’s an underdog story,” says Gene Warman, an Ohio native sitting in a bar with his son in a city neither had heard of this time last year. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

    Warman and his 22-year-old son Andrew are on a four-day trip from the US to watch their new-found love, Wrexham AFC. They flew into London the previous day and embarked on a four-hour, 183-mile drive to the northeast of Wales. Jetlag cannot be countenanced on a sacred trip such as this.

    In an often brutal and bleak world, the recent resurgence of Wrexham, the city as well as the soccer club, lifts the soul. Tourists smile when asked for their thoughts on this small industrial city near the English-Welsh border, brought to the world’s attention by the soccer club’s owners, actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

    Locals have always loved talking about their club, the beating heart of this working-class community, but now there’s a confidence and, crucially, optimism, when doing so.

    In loaning the club their money – over £3 million ($3.7 million) according to the club’s accounts – and the offshoots of their fame, Reynolds and McElhenney have brought hope to a city and its people. The future is exciting when you’re no longer fighting for survival.

    Grey clouds cocoon the city on the eve of the biggest match in the club’s recent history. The nearby mountains contributing to the rain threat that never materializes. It is not an April day for the outdoors, but a perfect one for what has arguably become the most well-known pub in Wales, the No. 1 stop on the Wrexham tourist trail.

    The Warmans have yet to venture into the center of the city, instead heading first to the Turf, a pub where the club was founded.

    Those who have watched “Welcome to Wrexham,” the TV documentary which follows the owners’ 2021 takeover and first season in charge, need no explanation as to why this pub a few steps away from the main entrance of the stadium is a must-see for visitors.

    From the first episode, landlord Wayne Jones and his customers are held as an example of how Wrexham AFC is woven into the fabric of people’s lives.

    The pub looks much like it does on television: the food van in the parking lot, the painted red-brick wall with fans’ signatures, framed football shirts and other soccer memorabilia hanging from walls and pictures of Reynolds and McElhenney dotted around.

    What has changed, as is the case for a lot of businesses in the city, is that there are more customers than ever. Trade has, Jones says, “practically doubled” since the documentary was first aired. A city that was struggling economically, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, is now, he says, thriving.

    “I dread to think where we would’ve been had Ryan and Rob not come in,” says Jones, a man who has become accustomed to interviews, this being his fourth of a day that has just become afternoon.

    The Turf is full of life, locals mixing with tourists who want to drink at the pub they know from the show. Jones, a season ticket holder, says he scoffed at warnings from McElhenney to prepare for tourists once the documentary was aired. “As much as I love this town, we are just a small industrial town in northeast Wales,” he says. “But they’ve nailed it.”

    Andrew and Gene Warman from Ohio pictured with the Turf landlord Wayne Jones (center).

    Standing at the bar, sipping beers bought for them by a regular, are Los Angeles-based businessmen Rajat Bhattacharya and Arun Mahtani. The pair have tickets to watch Liverpool play the next day and felt they had to visit Wrexham. At a table a few meters away are husband and wife Thania and Jeff LaMirand from Washington, making Wrexham part of a short trip to Europe which will also encompass a few days in Madrid, Spain. There are no longer run-of-the-mill days at the Turf.

    Jones says on a quiet day about 20 to 30 tourists visit the pub. “It’s every day, without fail,” he says, breaking out into a disbelieving smile.

    “It’s a bit bonkers that we’re getting people from Colorado and Texas. There are five chaps just walked in now from Alabama. There’s a guy on the plane over from Alabama.

    “The people that I’ve spoken to have said they fell in love with the documentary.

    “The majority of them said they fell in love with the community, and it’s quite clever from Robert and Ryan because they could have just made another pure football documentary … But they focused on the town and Rob said to me, ‘I knew that if I could get Americans to see the town, they could relate to the people and then they’d want to be a part of it.’ And that’s exactly what’s happened.”

    Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney autographs can be seen on a wall at the Turf.

    Wales was conquered by England in the 13th century, but the two countries would not be united politically until the 16th century.

    It is a long, sometimes bloody history; 200 years of English invasions and Welsh revolts before the country was completely conquered and, though peaceful for hundreds of years, the relationship between the two neighbors is still complicated. They are different countries sharing common laws, friends for the most part despite cultural differences, yet like for many a once conquered nation, the past is not forgotten.

    Aerial view of Wrexham on May 12, 2018.

    For north Walians, there is an added twist. Not only have they often felt a shadow looming over them from the bigger, more powerful neighbor to the east, but a disconnect with compatriots in the south, too.

    There is a sense that the focus has always been on the south, almost everything is there: the capital city (Cardiff), the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament), the national stadium, the country’s two biggest cities and, in fact, most of the population. And there is no major highway from Cardiff to north Wales, just a winding trunk highway – an often-beautiful route, but not a quick one.

    But now, there’s Wrexham with a story that, in hindsight, feels as if it was just waiting for Hollywood. The oldest soccer club in Wales, the third-oldest professional club in the world, saved from the brink by its fans; the club that was once in the higher echelons of the English football league system before it tumbled into the fifth tier of the English game, its fortunes taking a downturn both on and off the pitch. Then came Reynolds and McElhenney, with money, a plan and stardust.

    “The searchlight has changed,” says Elen-Mai Nefydd, head of Welsh medium academic development at the city’s university, named after the medieval Welsh nationalist leader Owain Glyndwr.

    “There hadn’t been much interest in us, to the point where lots of people who live in Wrexham in the past would have preferred to say, ‘I live in northeast Wales, not far from Chester’ … to the point where people would almost bypass the name.”

    Nefydd talks of there being an “energy” among the locality, mainly thanks to the soccer club, but also because of the city status given to Wrexham in 2022, plans to redevelop the city center and the “Wrexham Gateway project,” which aims to regenerate an area of the city that includes building a new stand at the club’s Racecourse Ground, which will increase the stadium’s capacity to over 15,000.

    “There’s a proudness around saying now that you’re from Wrexham and that’s a huge shift, isn’t it, to be in a position where you’ve almost masked where you’re from to being proud of where you live and work,” she says.

    One of Wrexham city center's shopping areas, pictured on April 22.

    A Welsh speaker, Nefydd talks passionately about the language, which is spoken by nearly 30% of the population, according to the 2022 Annual Population Survey (APS), which is around 900,600 people.

    Throughout the documentary, soccer terminology is explained in English, American English and Welsh. One episode solely focuses on Wales’ history, all of which, says Nefydd, has “highlighted the importance of the language” and contributed to an “exceptional” confidence in the country for its language and culture.

    “What Rob and Ryan have done is they’ve opened people’s eyes to the fact that we are not a dying language,” she says. “We’re a language that’s alive. People socialize in Welsh, they are educated in Welsh, we work in Welsh. If it takes two Hollywood stars to do that, then fantastic.”

    Mark Griffiths is an English teacher and for nearly 40 years has been commentating on Wrexham games in his spare time. His voice can be heard on matchdays via the club’s website, and features in the podcast, ‘Final Whistle,’ and the local radio station, Calon FM.

    For years, Griffiths has been overseeing the hashtag ‘Ask Wrexham’ ‘#askwxm’ on Twitter to generate interaction with listeners. For the most part, the same diehard 20 fans would take part, he says, and on matchdays there would be no questions at all because everyone would be at the match. But now, times have changed.

    “The hashtag is completely out of control,” the 54-year-old says, explaining that he struggles to answer all the questions he receives even after introducing a one-hour weekly podcast specifically for that purpose.

    It will come as no surprise to read that Griffiths has featured in “Welcome to Wrexham.” In 18 episodes, the show has managed to get viewers “hooked” on the city, he says, describing the show as McElhenney’s “hymn to the working class.”

    Mark Griffiths, right, says Wrexham used to be a town that lacked confidence.

    “There was a concern … ‘Will we be made to look stupid?’ You know, the big-time guys coming in from civilization and pat the cave dwellers on their heads and save them and we all look like fools, and they haven’t,” he says.

    Griffiths was a member of the Wrexham Supporters’ Trust which helped raise money to stop the club from going out of business. He was one of the 98.4% who overwhelmingly voted in favor of the American-Canadian takeover.

    When Reynolds and McEllhenney put forward their proposal to the trust, Griffiths says they talked about having stewardship of the club, rather than ownership. They used, he says, “the right language.”

    “I’m very cynical,” says Griffiths. “I like the idea of fan ownership. I like the idea that we don’t end up at the whim of one or two wealthy people. But this is that rare occasion that they are just clearly in it for the right reasons.

    “I feel strongly about fans being the only people you can trust with a club, but these guys are for real. They’re amazing.”

    In the shadow of the Racecourse Ground is the city’s university campus and, every Friday evening, its sports center is bustling. Spirits are high tonight and laughter fills the air; coaches are yelling orders, sometimes they tease when a challenge doesn’t go quite to plan. Three coaches scoot around the perimeters of the court, chasing balls which go out of bounds, as the players, who are all in electric wheelchairs, move around at quite some speed.

    These are weekly sessions which have been made possible because of investment from the club.

    Kerry Evans, Wrexham AFC’s disability liaison officer, is on the sidelines every week, overseeing a junior and adult team. When the powerchair teams were formed last August, Evans had intended to play, but there is too much to organize, she says; always a call to make, or a ringing phone to pick up, questions to answer, plans to be made.

    The owners were, Evans says, “very prominent” in setting up powerchair football in the city and it has, she says, transformed lives.

    “We’ve got players that come that say it’s what gets them up on a Friday,” she says.

    Kerry Evans pictured with Reynolds and McElhenney.

    Evans jokes she is the club’s go-to person for media interviews because, she says, her role is wholly positive. She became a full-time employee at the club last March but prior to that had been volunteering for about six-and-a-half years, doing what she does now, which is making the stadium more accessible and welcoming for people with disabilities.

    Wrexham is the first club in Wales to fund a powerchair team, says Evans. Playing on an indoor court, a team consists of four players – a goalkeeper, a defender, a midfielder and an attacker – and they compete using a larger ball than your typical soccer ball, while goalposts are two upright posts six meters apart.

    Caio Jones is a 22-year-old wheelchair user from Bangor, a city in the northwest of the country, about 69 miles from Wrexham, or a 70-minute journey one way. He is one of a few in the group who is ready to play competitively from next season.

    For 12 months, Evans investigated the feasibility of bringing powerchair to Wrexham before making a proposal to the club’s board. Once approved, the club’s community trust coaches had to be trained, and chairs needed to be purchased. New, each chair – which have bumpers at the front to allow players to travel with the ball – costs about $5,000 to $7,500, says Evans.

    “Rob and Ryan offered brand new chairs, which I did turn down in the beginning … I felt we really needed to prove that this was going to take off and be a thing,” she says. “We’re now struggling to keep up with the level of demand with the chairs that we need. It’s grown and grown.”

    It is quite the change from the early 2000s when there were fears the club would be evicted from its stadium, or nearly 12 years ago when the Racecourse Ground and training facilities were sold to the university and fans raised more than £100,000 (almost $162,000 at August 2011’s exchange rate) in a day to save the club.

    “I was around when fans were bringing in deeds to their houses to keep our club alive … without those people many years ago, we wouldn’t have a club now to even be discussed with Hollywood owners,” says Evans.

    King Charles III visited Wrexham AFC last year and met the club's owners and players.

    No one speaks negatively about Reynolds and McElhenney because their investment has made a difference; to the women’s team which was promoted this season to the Welsh first division, to the fans in wheelchairs who can now go to some away games thanks to a wheelchair accessible bus the club provides, to families of children with autism who have a quiet zone in the stadium available to them on matchdays.

    “Wrexham football club would not have survived Covid due to the fan ownership,” says Evans. “Reading about people losing their business all across the UK [because of the impact of the pandemic] and Wrexham suddenly had this hope and excitement about it.

    “We were one of the luckiest towns, as it was then, to come out of Covid with so much to look forward to, and both owners brought that to our town.”

    Finally. Forty-four games into the season, and today is the day Wrexham could get promoted. No club has been stuck in the National League for longer. Fifteen often dreary years in the fifth tier; some nearly-there seasons, some never-come-close seasons.

    Five times Wrexham has qualified for the playoffs since 2011 but each occasion ended in failure, which explains why seeds of doubt are hard for some to rid. But Wrexham should beat its opponent Boreham Wood at home, which would secure automatic promotion and the league title.

    “Being an old-school Wrexham fan, I can’t get too carried away, I’ve seen a lot of disappointments over the years,” says Rob Clarke, the owner of mad4movies and another who features in the documentary.

    Rob Clarke, the owner of mad4movies in Wrexham.

    Clarke’s DVD shop is in the city’s market hall. About 10 stalls are in business – selling dog food, sweets, plastic flowers and such – while the rest are empty. There is a sadness to a silent shopping quarter on a Saturday afternoon. Not everywhere in the city can thrive.

    Clarke says he could make more money in another line of work, but over the last 17 years in business, his shop has become a hub for anyone wanting to talk about Wrexham AFC, and there’s nothing he loves doing more than that. “Usually put the world to rights on a Monday morning after the weekend results,” he says.

    The documentary was first aired last year, and Clarke is still struggling to come to terms with its impact. “It’s crazy,” he says with a shake of the head and a smile.

    “I’ve had people taking pictures of this place … Not even I take a picture of this place!” he says. “People are coming from all over, the American fans coming in and they’ve bought the DVDs. They know they can’t play them over there because it’s a different format, but they want a souvenir or something.”

    Magic can happen under floodlights. A pitch becomes a stage, providing vivid color to a dark night. Bright lights, big emotions. The atmosphere crackles.

    Wrexham is leading 3-1, the silence that greeted Boreham Wood’s first-minute goal long since replaced by over 10,000 delirious, singing fans. One delivers his farewell soliloquy to what he calls this “awful, awful, league,” with a few expletives thrown in for punctuation.

    Five minutes into stoppage time and fans are rising to their feet, increasing the decibels, preparing for the full-time roar. And then the whistle blows.

    Wrexham fans celebrate on the pitch after their team beat Boreham Wood at the Racecourse Ground.

    Thousands pour onto the pitch, even though they were warned not to before kick-off. The heart rules during an intoxicating hit to the senses such as this. Players disappear in the red mist of flares; some are carried on the shoulders of fans, and joyful chaos ensues.

    The pitch is now a metaphorical therapy couch, years of frustration and disappointment released and replaced with ecstasy.

    Cameras capture McElhenney crying in the stands. Reynolds embraces his friend, a moment captured by Paul Rudd, the star of Marvel’s “Ant-Man” franchise, another Hollywood A-lister visiting the city. McElhenney would later say he “blacked out” during that moment.

    The pair later joined the team on the pitch, jumping as if they were on pogo sticks when the trophy was lifted. Promotion to League Two achieved and done in style – over 100 points accumulated in a season for the first time in the club’s history, an unbeaten campaign at home, more than 100 goals scored and a record number of points collected in a single National League season.

    And for the first time since 1988, four Welsh clubs will now play in England’s football league, with these clubs competing in the English system by virtue of the Welsh football league system having not been created when they were founded.

    An end of a chapter, but not the story.

    McElhenney and Reynolds celebrate with the National League trophy.

    In its 158-year existence, the club has experienced nothing quite like these last two years. An unprecedented 24,000 of this season’s shirts sold by last December, turnover soaring, global sales accounting for 80% of merchandise sold. A (now former) National League team with a worldwide following. And not a negative to report, other than the £2.91 million ($3.61m) in losses for the year to June 2022, Reynolds and McElhenney’s first full season in charge.

    Wrexham’s owners have charmed the city and its inhabitants and, in turn, the earthiness of the city’s people and their passion for the club has captivated, seduced almost, the rest of the world.

    Celebrity combined with sporting romance is a heady mix. Season Two and League Two lie ahead.

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  • Ex-Fugees rapper Pras Michel found guilty in scheme to help China influence US government | CNN Politics

    Ex-Fugees rapper Pras Michel found guilty in scheme to help China influence US government | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The rapper Pras Michel was found guilty in federal court in Washington on Wednesday of 10 criminal counts related to an international conspiracy reaching the highest levels of the US government.

    The Grammy-winning artist and former member of the Fugees faced multiple counts over the failed conspiracy to help Malaysian businessman Jho Low and the Chinese government gain access to US officials, including former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

    Michel was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud the US, witness tampering and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. He faces up to 20 years in prison. No sentencing date was set.

    Michel sat stoically as each count came down on Wednesday and did not comment to reporters outside the courthouse.

    His attorney, David Kenner, expressed disappointment about the verdicts, but said he was confident that his mistrial motions will work out in their favor.

    “We are extremely disappointed in that result but are very, very confident in the ultimate outcome of this case,” Kenner told reporters, adding: “If we do move to a sentencing hearing I remain very confident we will certainly appeal this case. This is not over.”

    Michel testified last week that Low paid Michel $20 million in 2012 in order to get a picture of himself with Obama and prosecutors alleged Michel funneled over $800,000 of that money to Obama’s campaign through a number of straw donors.

    In his defense, Michel testified he never used the money at Low’s direction but instead saw it as his money which he could spend however he wanted.

    “I could have bought 12 elephants with it,” he told the jury.

    When Trump came to power in 2017 and investigations started to ramp up into Low and his alleged role in billions of dollars being embezzled from 1MBD, the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, Low went to Michel again, prosecutors alleged.

    According to the prosecutors, Low directed over $100 million to Michel to help push the government, including Trump, to drop its investigation into Low. Prosecutors also say Michel advocated for the extradition of a Chinese dissident, Guo Wengui, on behalf of the Chinese government.

    Michel, however, testified he only tried to help Low find an attorney in the US and only told authorities about Guo because he thought he was a criminal. The former Fugees member also said the $100 million was for a media business he was starting and the investment wasn’t from Low.

    Low, who was charged along with Michel, is believed to be in China. Guo has since been arrested and charged by the Justice Department with defrauding investors in an unrelated case.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Michelle Yeoh set to return as Emperor Philippa Georgiou in new ‘Star Trek’ movie | CNN

    Michelle Yeoh set to return as Emperor Philippa Georgiou in new ‘Star Trek’ movie | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Live long and prosper, Michelle Yeoh.

    After winning a best actress Oscar for her role in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” last month, Yeoh is preparing to step back into the Star Trek universe to reprise her role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou in the new “Star Trek: Section 31” movie.

    Yeoh was first introduced as the character in 2017, when the Emmy-winning “Star Trek: Discovery” TV series debuted on Paramount+.

    Paramount+ and CBS Studios announced the news on Tuesday. Yeoh will also serve as an executive producer on the project.

    Yeoh said in a press release that she is “beyond thrilled” to reprise her role in the “Section 31” movie, which she says “has been near and dear to my heart since I began the journey of playing Philippa all the way back when this new golden age of ‘Star Trek’ launched.”

    “To see her finally get her moment is a dream come true in a year that’s shown me the incredible power of never giving up on your dreams. We can’t wait to share what’s in store for you, and until then: live long and prosper (unless Emperor Georgiou decrees otherwise),” she continued.

    It truly has been a year of dreams coming true for Yeoh, who made history as the first woman of Asian descent to win an Oscar in the best actress category in March. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” took home seven Oscars that night, including Yeoh’s big win and the top prize for best picture.

    “Section 31” will showcase Yeoh’s character as she joins a secret division of Starfleet and is “tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets and faces the sins of her past,” according to an official synopsis.

    “Star Trek: Section 31” will begin production later this year.

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