On May 29, 2026, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, a man named Nicky dropped to one knee on stage in front of 6,000 concertgoers during a Miss Montreal performance at AFAS Live, only for his girlfriend Loes to shake her head and publicly explain why she could not accept the proposal. Source link
Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Pop star PinkPantheress may have won a Brit award, played Glastonbury and stormed the music charts, but there’s one milestone she’s not allowed to tick off – competing on BBC One’s Pointless. The “Illegal” singer, real name Victoria Walker, revealed at a concert in Manchester that she had made it to the last stage of applications to take part in the game show but was stopped before filming after producers realised who she was. “It’s is my favourite trivia show, and I wanted to be on the show,” the 25-year-old told the audience. PinkPantheress performing at Coachella this year (Getty) “And I made it to before they put you on TV at the last stage. I was in Manchester, I was ready to go on TV to play Pointless. Then someone comes in, and he goes, ‘wait, hold on – we …
Orwoll characterized the policy as “free association,” not segregation. On its website, Return to the Land describes itself a “private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry.” Walker’s attorney, Reed Colfax, argued Return to the Land is a racist organization in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws dating to 1866. “Return to the Land’s actions constitute blatant and brazen violations of long-standing federal and state fair housing laws,” Reed Colfax said in a statement posted on the Legal Defense Fund website. “Ms. Walker has been deprived of her housing and civil rights, including the right to purchase land and build housing.” Walker, a real estate broker in and around St. Louis, Missouri, said in the complaint that she learned last summer that the group was selling land in the Ozarks, “an area where she occasionally vacationed.” She was drawn to the listing partly because the asking price was unusually low, and she decided to apply, citing both the investment potential and other possibilities the land offered. During the application …
Developers “can no longer invest in new London sites”, the capital’s biggest housebuilder has claimed after its plan to bulldoze an old shopping centre for almost 900 homes was rejected. Berkeley Group‘s bid to knockdown the Aylesham Centre in Peckham was dismissed by the planning inspector this week. The scheme would have seen 867 new flats, 77 of which would be affordable. While the planning inspector said the development would bring “social and economic benefits” and ease Southwark’s “acute” housing shortage, it ruled this would “not outweigh the harm to the relevant designated heritage assets important to the area”. Rob Perrins, Executive Chair at Berkeley Group, said: “This decision demonstrates the extreme uncertainty developers continue to experience within the planning system.” The proposed development at the Aylesham Centre in Peckham (Berkeley Homes) He added: “How can we be allowed to build next to world heritage assets like Tower Bridge, but not here? “If we’re no longer permitted to meet housing needs on brownfield land then where should we build? It would take hundreds of acres …
The UK and 45 other European countries have signed an agreement that explicitly endorses plans to send unwanted asylum seekers to third country hubs. A political declaration from the 46 members of the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR), said states had an “undeniable sovereign right” to control their borders. It is understood that the UK is now seeking a deal with an unnamed third country, similar to the Italy-Albania agreement that allowed Rome to place detention centres in Albania. In that deal, the hubs were initially intended for asylum seekers from countries considered safe while their applications were processed. Giorgia Meloni’s government has since used them to hold people to be deported whose applications have been rejected. According to the seven-page document, countries should be free “to address and potentially deter irregular migration”. It said: “Amongst the forms of new approaches that have been envisaged by several member states are processing requests for international protection in a third country, third country ‘return hubs’, and cooperation with …
Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost has revealed that one of his sketch ideas, involving Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, was brushed off for being “too ridiculous.” Two weeks later, the scenario played out in real life. Jost, 43, recalled the bizarre moment during Thursday’s segment of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “We were pitching ideas for one of the cold opens, like, two months ago,” he explained. “And I was like, ‘Would it be funny if Hegseth just did that Bible verse that they have in Pulp Fiction?’ Remember, they’re like, from Ezekiel…” Host Fallon chimed in, acknowledging: “Yeah, Samuel L. Jackson, 12:17.” “Yeah, we talked about it, and we were like, ‘That would be too ridiculous,’” Jost continued. “And it would take up all this time in the cold open. It would seem like we wouldn’t. “And then he …
The 55-year-old dropped a major hint about the ‘fabulous’ new presenters of the BBC dance competition Source link
When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.” Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.” Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poetry, a fact upon which critic Edmund Wilson seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. …
Across the United States, the fight over data center construction has largely pitted stamp-happy municipal governments against their own residents. As these battles multiply, local officials are increasingly pressured to approve projects their constituents oppose, while more and more voters take their struggles to the ballot box. Residents in Saline Township, Michigan, however, thought they had avoided the drama after their township board and planning commission both voted to decline a 21 million square foot data center in their backyard. It was exactly what Saline’s 2,883-some residents wanted. Unfortunately for them, the data center developer soon sued the tiny township, Fortune reported, which was ultimately bullied into accepting the $16 billion development. Back in September, Saline’s planning commission rejected the request to rezone 575 acres of farmland for the data center, proposed by the company Related Digital, a subsidiary of a real estate conglomerate owned by billionaire Steven Roth (who’s been in the news lately for other reasons.) Two days later, Related Digital filed suit, alleging the township had practice “exclusionary zoning.” The local officials …
President Donald Trump’s negotiators face the arduous task of trying to convince the president that a deal he previously rejected is their best option in Iran. Last month, Trump initially gave his blessing for a so-called “cash for uranium” deal, under which the US would release around $20 billion in frozen funds in exchange for Iran handing over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. Trump’s negotiators, vice president JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law, received repeated approvals from the president while they were in Islamabad, giving them confidence a deal was close. But the deal unraveled, in part because Trump was warned by his team that there was a risk he could be seen as giving Iran “pallets of cash”—an echo of his own oft-stated criticism of Barack Obama’s Iran deal—and he pulled the plug, the sources said. Except now, that’s once again the cornerstone of the current proposal. The current negotiations for a memorandum of understanding that could guide talks …
