Entertainment
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Greece introduces ‘MyCoast’ App to tackle beach violationsIn an effort to enforce newly implemented stringent beach regulations, Greece has launched the ‘MyCoast’ app, empowering users to report beach violations effortlessly.03 May 2024Read More...
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European Court of Human Rights rejects Kirkorov’s case against Lithuania entry banThe European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has dismissed a complaint filed by Russian pop star Philipp Kirkorov against Lithuania's decision to bar his entry into the country.23 April 2024Read More...
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Risnjak National Park: Croatia's hidden gem wins Europe's top spotNestled within Croatia's picturesque Gorski Kotar region, Risnjak National Park emerges as a beacon of untouched beauty, earning recognition as one of Europe's premier destinations sans the23 April 2024Read More...
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Swiss castles experience record visitor numbersIn 2023, the National Association of Swiss Castles witnessed a historic milestone, welcoming over 1.3 million visitors to its 28 castles. This achievement marks a new record for the organization,23 April 2024Read More...
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Underground surge: Belgium grapples with 2,214 illegal gambling websitesResearch conducted by gambling analysis firm Yield Sec has unveiled a concerning trend in Belgium's online gambling landscape. According to their findings, a staggering 2,214 illegal gambling14 April 2024Read More...
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Flanders and Brussels Embrace Slow Art Day, inviting visitors to savor artistic experiencesOn April 13th, several museums in Flanders and Brussels will once again host a variety of activities as part of Slow Art Day, an annual tradition aimed at encouraging a deeper12 April 2024Read More...
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4 Croatian beaches named Europe’s bestAs Croatia gears up for what promises to be its most spectacular summer season yet, the BookRetreats Summer 2024 Report has officially unveiled the top beaches across Europe, catering to10 April 2024Read More...
News
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Belgian Princess Elisabeth sets course for HarvardThe Belgian Royal Court has confirmed that Princess Elisabeth, the heir to the throne, will pursue her education at Harvard University in Boston, marking a significant step in herRead More...
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Education unions initiate series of strikes across FlandersEducation unions ACOD Education, COC, and VSOA Education are set to organize demonstrations across five Flemish cities in May as part of a series of strikes. The unions' discontent stemsRead More...
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Algerian nationals can now be detained prior to deportation, court decidesThe highest Dutch court ruled on Monday that Algerian nationals whose asylum requests have been rejected can once again be detained pending their deportation.Read More...
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Transfers of asylum seekers to other EU member states increasingBelgium transferred 1,241 asylum seekers to another European Union member state last year, where they already had a pending procedure. The number of transfers by Belgium has been onRead More...
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Polish cheesecake ranked as world's No.1Polish ‘sernik’ has claimed the top spot on the list of the Top 8 cheesecakes in the world. Cheesecake. Cheesecake. Photo: PAP/Darek Delmanowicz According to TasteAtlas, which curated theRead More...
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Wealthy family to clear debts for 3,000 Rotterdam families, mirroring Arnhem's initiativeFollowing Arnhem's announcement to absolve debts for around 50 households in Immerloo, recognized as the most financially distressed area in the Netherlands, a Rotterdam-based family,Read More...
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'Good to be together': celebrating 20 years of Poland in the EUPoland's government has initiated a special social and informational campaign titled "Good to Be Together: 20 Years of Poland in the European Union," marking a significant milestone in theRead More...
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ÖBB unveils Summer Train Timetable with construction updatesAs summer approaches, Austria's ÖBB gears up for extensive construction activities in the eastern region, leading to adjustments in train schedules along certain routes.Read More...
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Rare book theft: Europol cracks down on international gangIn a collaborative effort involving European law enforcement agencies, Europol successfully apprehended four suspected individuals involved in the theft of antique and rare books.Read More...
Most Read
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News
Harry Potter makes his stage debut on Tuesday in a new London play that imagines the fictional boy wizard as a father of three, in the latest offshoot of the globally successful franchise.
"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is set 19 years after the seventh and final book in the series by J.K. Rowling, which have sold more than 450 million copies since 1997 and been adapted into eight films.
Like many of his fans, Potter has now grown up and has three children with his wife Ginny Weasley, the sister of his friend Ron, and is working at the Ministry of Magic.
He still has his trademark round-rimmed glasses and the scar on his head, a permanent reminder of his nemesis Lord Voldemort, but must now help his youngest son Albus confront the family’s dark past.
Cut-price previews for the play at the Palace Theatre, in London’s West End, begin on Tuesday ahead of the world premiere on July 30.
Rowling pleaded with spectators at the previews not to disclose the details of the play.
Hollywood star and UN refugee agency envoy Angelina Jolie is to become a visiting professor at Britain’s prestigious London School of Economics, the university announced Monday.
Jolie was named as one of four new “visiting professors in practice” who will contribute to a new master’s programme on “women, peace and security”.
“I am very encouraged by the creation of this master’s programme,” Jolie said in a statement.
“I hope other academic institutions will follow this example, as it is vital that we broaden the discussion on how to advance women’s rights and end impunity for crimes that disproportionately affect women, such as sexual violence in conflict.”
Also appointed was British former foreign minister William Hague, with whom Jolie co-founded the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2010.
Scarves emblazoned with red dragons draped over their black business suits, Chinese officials lit incense and bowed solemnly at the feet of a mythical ancestor known as the Yellow Emperor.
The avowedly atheist Communist Party is promoting worship of the ancient figure as it seeks to bolster its legitimacy -- and emphasise Chinese blood ties, including with Taiwan ahead of the inauguration of Beijing-sceptic president Tsai Ing-wen.
Thousands gathered in the heartland province of Henan, where the Yellow Emperor –- described in archaic annals and present day schoolbooks as the
founder of Chinese civilisation -- is said to have been born 5,000 years ago.
Shots from gold-painted cannon began the annual ceremony, and the crowd, many in replica antique costume, listened to a booming announcer heralding the "ancestor of the Chinese nation".
High-ranking cadres –- including the province's top official, and a former vice culture minister -– processed up a red carpet, placed offerings in front of an altar and gazed into the statue's chiselled visage, before bowing.
Lydia Zhou, an investment manager who flew from Shanghai to attend, told AFP: "I'm here to worship. He is our ancestor and this is his birthplace."
South Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize on Monday, sharing the £50,000 ($72,000, 63,500 euros) award with her translator -- who had only taught herself Korean three years before.
Han Kang, 45, an author and creative writing teacher who is already successful in South Korea, is likely to enjoy a spike in international sales following the win for "The Vegetarian".
"I'm so honoured" she told AFP. "The work features a protagonist who wants to become a plant, and to leave the human race to save herself from the dark side human nature.
"Through this extreme narrative I felt I could question... the difficult question of being human."
She was the first South Korean to win the prize.
Described as "lyrical and lacerating" by chairman of the judges Boyd Tonkin, the tale traces the story of an ordinary woman's rejection of convention from three different perspectives.
It was picked unanimously by the panel of five judges, beating six other novels including "The Story of the Lost Child" by Italian sensation Elena Ferrante and "A Strangeness in My Mind" by Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.
"This is a book of tenderness and terror," Boyd told guests at the award ceremony dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Han Kang's first book to appear in English, "The Vegetarian" was described by newspaper The Guardian as a shock to the system.
"Across the three parts, we are pressed up against a society's most inflexible structures -- expectations of behaviour, the workings of institutions -- and we watch them fail one by one," Daniel Hahn wrote in a review.
- 'Climbing a mountain' -
For the first time this year, the award went jointly to the translator, Deborah Smith, 28, who only started learning Korean three years before she embarked on the translation.
"This was the first book that I ever translated, and the best possible thing that can happen to a translator has just happened to me," an emotional Smith told AFP.
"When I was 22 I decided to teach myself Korean… I felt that I was limited by only being able to speak English. I'd always read a lot of translations, and you get the sense of this whole world being out there, very different perspectives, different stories," she said.
"It felt as thought I looked up almost every other word in the dictionary. It felt a bit like climbing a mountain. But at the same time just falling into this world that was so atmospheric and disturbing and moving -- it was a wonderful experience."
US actor Robert De Niro is involved in a project to build a new luxury hotel in the heart of London, he has revealed.
The 83-room Wellington Hotel project, if approved, would be built in Covent Garden and is expected to feature a spa and two restaurants.
"London is one of the most exciting and cosmopolitan cities in the world," the 72-year-old star said in a statement released Saturday.
"It makes perfect sense to develop a hotel that represents all of that in the heart of this city in Covent Garden."
Jubilant Ukrainians erupted in celebration Sunday after Jamala won the Eurovision Song Contest with a powerful tribute to her Tatar people's deportation from Russian-annexed Crimea in 1944.
"Yes!!!" Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted. "An unbelievable performance and victory! All of Ukraine gives you its heartfelt thanks, Jamala."
"Glory to Ukraine!" Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman added.
And Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko -- a former boxer who strongly backs Ukraine's new shift toward the West -- said he never doubted Jamala's victory because she was "genuine".
The 32-year-old winner is a member of the Muslim Tatar minority of Crimea who saw her great-grandmother deported along with 240,000 others by Stalin in the penultimate year of World War II.
Many of those died on the tortuous voyage to Central Asia and other distant lands.
A new iPad app intended to make William Shakespeare's works more accessible is being launched by actor Ian McKellen and director Richard Loncraine on Saturday, the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death.
The app users see actors reading out "The Tempest", facing the camera with no costume or staging as the text scrolls, and its developers said they hope eventually to cover all of Shakespeare's 37 plays.
"This is not a production. We're in our own clothes, the actors are not relating to each other. The person we're relating to is you, the person at the other end of the app," said McKellen, who worked with Loncraine on a production of "Richard III" 20 years ago.
"We're trying to help you," he said.
"Shakespeare did not mean you to read it. He wanted the actors to read it, learn it, put the script aside and speak it to the audience," he added.
"The Tempest" was chosen because it is Shakespeare's last play but also the one that appears first in a compilation of Shakespeare works put together in 1623 -- seven years after the famous playwright's death.
Users can pause the readings to click on notes whose level of detail can be adapted if the viewers are schoolchildren or university students.
Loncraine, who set up Heuristic Media, said the app "helps people to comprehend" Shakespeare but was "not meant to be a substitute" for watching a play.
"It was written 400 years ago so it's very, very difficult for modern audiences who haven't studied it," he said.
The programme "strips away elements that you don't need to understand the text," he said.
An unflattering painting depicting a nude Donald Trump went on show in London this weekend having being censored in the United States, where its creator claims to have received a thousand death threats from his supporters.
Los-Angeles based artist Illma Gore's Make America Great Again, named after the Republican candidate's campaign slogan, went on display at the Maddox gallery in the exclusive Mayfair neighbourhood on Friday, and is valued at £1 million (S$1.9 million).
"Make America Great Again was created to evoke a reaction from its audience, good or bad, about the significance we place on our physical selves," said the 24-year-old artist.
"I drew Trump nude, I was evoking a reaction from people... so I tried not to think about it until I spoke to a lawyer who suggested I go to the police about it and file a report in case something happens," she said of the death threats, which came after posting the painting online.
Harper Lee, one of America's most celebrated novelists who died in February, thought Donald Trump's infamous Taj Mahal casino was hell on Earth, a stash of her private correspondence revealed Monday.
The "To Kill a Mockingbird" author, whose masterpiece about racial injustice was read by millions, slammed the billionaire presidential hopeful's boardwalk resort in New Jersey in a letter to a friend in 1990.
"The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City," Lee wrote in the missive, recovered along with several others from her New York apartment.
Lee, who was apparently entertaining visitors, stayed at the $1 billion gambling spot a few months after its April 1990 inauguration.
The resort is now owned by billionaire Carl Icahn, who took over in February after Trump Entertainment Resorts came out of bankruptcy, though it still bears the Republican frontrunner's name.
Did you hear the one about the Irishwoman who taught the French how to cook?
It may sound like some sort of dubious Irish joke. But in the case of Trish Deseine there is more than a grain of truth to the tale.
The farmer's daughter from County Antrim is France's bestselling food writer, having sold more than a million copies of her cookbooks.
She is also credited with fundamentally changing the way millions of ordinary French people cook by taking away the fear of living up to one of the world's greatest culinary traditions.
With books like "Petits Plats entre Amis" (Little Dishes Between Friends) and "Je Veux du Chocolat!" (I Want Chocolate!), she taught a generation intimidated by long shadow of France's gastronomic greats to dare.
For Deborah Dupont-Daguet, the owner of La Librarie Gourmande in Paris -- which claims to be the world's biggest culinary bookshop -- Deseine was nothing short of an inspiration with her clever, unashamedly simple takes on French classics and recipes from around the world
The first cookbook Dupont-Daguet ever bought was "Little Dishes Between Friends".
"It's weird but I learned French cooking from that book. You would never see those types of tips in a French cookbook 15 years ago. It's completely crazy," she said, "but it took an Irishwoman to tell us these things."
Even Deseine is still slighty bemused by her success. "I have theories, but I really don't know why," she told AFP. "People felt liberated because I was taking the fuss out of cooking. I think maybe it was okay for an outsider to say you don't have to go through 50 complicated steps. My approach was very natural and direct and sensual."
But having been France's Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson rolled into one, Deseine is now trying to crack an even harder nut.
Her new book, "Mon Irlande", or "Home" in its English translation, is an attempt to bring the simple virtues of Irish cooking to the French and the rest of the world.
No easy task for a country more synonymous with a certain black liquid refreshment and a long history of famine and hunger than its food.
But Deseine, 51, is convinced its time has come.