Kneecap are not rebels
Kneecap had done a small set at the 100 Club on Oxford Street on Thursday evening, but Wide Awake was their first real show since one of the group's members, Mo Chara, was charged on Wednesday with terrorism offences by the Metropolitan Police.
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Western Telegraph
27 minutes ago
- Western Telegraph
Trump names Stallone and Crawford among Kennedy Centre Honours nominees
Crawford starred in Phantom Of The Opera on Broadway and the West End, and writer Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber was himself a Kennedy Centre Honours recipient in 2006. Other previous British recipients have included Sir Elton John in 2004 and Dame Julie Andrews in 2001. President Donald Trump stands beside photos of Kennedy Centre Honours nominees, from left country music star George Strait, actor-singer Michael Crawford and Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone (Alex Brandon/AP) Mr Trump said he will 'fully renovate' the entire infrastructure of the Kennedy Centre to make it a 'crown jewel' of arts and culture in the United States. 'We're going to bring it to a higher level than it ever hit,' he said, adding that the venue would be featured in next year's celebrations of America's 250th anniversary. The Republican president said he did not want to host the programme but was invited to do so and agreed. Mr Trump avoided the Kennedy Centre Honours awards programme during his first term after artists said they would not attend out of protest. This year, the president has taken over as the Kennedy Centre's new chairman and sacked the board of trustees, which he replaced with loyalists. President Donald Trump speaks at the Kennedy Centre in Washington (Alex Brandon/AP) In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Mr Trump teased a name change for the centre, formally the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, and said it would be restored to its past glory. 'GREAT Nominees for the TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER, AWARDS,' he wrote. Mr Trump said work was being done on the site that would be 'bringing it back to the absolute TOP LEVEL of luxury, glamour, and entertainment'. 'It had fallen on hard times, physically, BUT WILL SOON BE MAKING A MAJOR COMEBACK!!!' he wrote. In a statement on its social media feed, the Kennedy Centre said it is 'honoured' to host Mr Trump, who will be visiting for the third time since January, and hinted that he would announce a construction project. Sylvester Stallone is unveiled by President Donald Trump to be a recipient of the Kennedy Centre Honours at the Kennedy Centre in Washington (Alex Brandon/AP) 'Thanks to his advocacy, our beautiful building will undergo renovations to restore its prestige and grandeur,' the venue said. 'We are also excited to be announcing this year's INCREDIBLE slate of Kennedy Center Honorees.' Mr Trump complained during a March visit that the building is in a state of 'tremendous disrepair'. The president, who had indicated he wanted a more active role in the selection process, said he was 'about 98% involved' in choosing the honorees. He said he 'turned down plenty' of names, saying those individuals were 'too woke', or too liberal. Mr Trump described the slate of artists he announced on Wednesday, which include several of his personal favourites, as 'great people'. Gloria Gaynor is among those being honoured (Alex Brandon/AP) Historically, a bipartisan advisory committee selects the recipients, who over the years have ranged from George Balanchine and Tom Hanks to Aretha Franklin and Stephen Sondheim. In the past, Mr Trump has floated the idea of granting Kennedy Centre Honours status to singer-songwriter Paul Anka and Stallone, one of three actors Mr Trump named as Hollywood ambassadors earlier this year. Anka was supposed to perform My Way at Mr Trump's first inaugural and backed out at the last moment. The Kennedy Centre Honours were established in 1978 and have been given to a broad range of artists. Until Mr Trump's first term, presidents of both major political parties traditionally attended the annual ceremony, even when they disagreed politically with a given recipient. Prominent liberals such as Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty were honoured during the administration of Republican George W Bush, and a leading conservative, Charlton Heston, was feted during the administration of Democrat Bill Clinton. In 2017, after honoree Norman Lear declared that he would not attend a White House celebration in protest over Mr Trump's proposed cuts to federal arts funding, Mr Trump and first lady Melania Trump decided to skip the Kennedy Centre event and stayed away throughout his first term. The rock band Kiss will be a recipient of the Kennedy Centre Honours (Alex Brandon/AP) Honorees during that time included such Trump critics as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field. Since taking office for a second time, Mr Trump has taken a much more forceful stance on the Kennedy Centre and inserted himself into its governance. Besides naming himself chairman and remaking the board, he has also indicated he would take over decisions regarding programming at the centre and vowed to end events featuring performers in drag. The steps have drawn further criticism from some artists. In March, the producers of Hamilton pulled out of staging the Broadway hit musical in 2026, citing Mr Trump's aggressive takeover of the institution's leadership. Country music artist George Strait (Alex Brandon/AP) Other artists who cancelled events include actor Issa Rae, singer Rhiannon Giddens and author Louise Penny. House Republicans added an amendment to a spending Bill that Mr Trump signed into law in July to rename the Kennedy Centre's Opera House after Melania Trump, but that venue has yet to be renamed. Maria Shriver, a niece of the late President Kennedy, a Democrat, has criticised as 'insane' a separate House proposal to rename the entire centre after Mr Trump. Recipients of the Kennedy Centre Honours are given a medallion on a rainbow ribbon, a nod to the range of skills that fall under the performing arts. In April, the centre changed the lights on the exterior from the long-standing rainbow to a permanent red, white and blue display.
Evening Standard
35 minutes ago
- Evening Standard
Sturgeon's ‘Stalinist' approach disastrous for SNP, claims Joanna Cherry
She added: 'The reason that I feel that her strategy failed and was so wrong was it was very narrow, and she repeatedly banged her head off the brick wall of the British Government's refusal to grant a section 30 order, rather than having a multi-faceted strategy to put pressure on them to do so, whilst also having a back-up plan if they said no.
Spectator
35 minutes ago
- Spectator
Has Zelensky become a liability?
Is Volodymyr Zelensky becoming a liability for the West and for his own country? We are entitled at least to pose this question as we (I mean America and Europe) are funding this war. I ask because it is clear, and for years has been clear, that the conflict with Russia must end in a compromise, and the shape of that compromise should not be in doubt. Russia must be given a ladder to climb down and this must involve land. Ukraine must gain what from the start has been the great prize that Moscow has tried to deny it: an unshakeable place in the community of European democracies, with the military and economic guarantees from the West that make that place secure. It was Boris Johnson who first framed the idiotic boast that now threatens to block progress towards such a settlement. 'Not an inch!' he cried, to Ukrainian cheers, when he was prime minister. Perhaps he thought this was just the kind of thing you say for an easy headline and the whoops of the groundlings; but even he must have doubted that Russia could realistically be driven from everything it had gained, and Vladimir Putin be forced to grovel. Too many British minds, I think, have been prey to the illusion that the second world war was a template for future conflict, and Hitler a template for Putin. Most wars, however, end in messy compromises, and that is how this one must end too. Let me start with the issue of land. It would be stupid for a generalist columnist like me to feign the knowledge that will be needed once negotiations over new borders begin, but I will volunteer this: Crimea (it can at least be argued) is not historically part of Ukraine and only got tacked onto Ukraine when the Soviet Union had both of them among its many countries and regions. I spent time in Ukraine last year, choosing to talk not to soldiers, generals or politicians, but to the under-25s. If you seek the point on the dial when many younger Ukrainians' refusal to contemplate ceding territory begins to waver, that place is Crimea. Despite official assurances from Ukraine that most citizens are against a land-for-peace deal, other polls (and my own conversations) suggest that people don't have principled objections to any ceding of land so much as serious doubts about whether Putin could ever be trusted to keep his word once a land-for-peace deal had been signed. That then – the security side of the agreement which I suggested at the beginning of this column – is absolutely the nub of the entire settlement. I'm in no doubt that if the Ukrainian people could be convinced the settlement would be permanent, and backed to the hilt by the West, they would vote tomorrow for a treaty that gave Russia permanent possession of some of what it has already taken. Let me anticipate at this point some readers' objections. Firstly this: 'Nothing agreed with Putin can he be relied upon to honour.' The trouble with this objection is that it is too strong. It means that even if he could be driven back to the old frontiers, and surrendered, he would try again later. I reply that he well might: that is why the security guarantees for Ukraine remain key. Secondly this: 'We must never reward Putin's aggression.' I'm afraid that, ever since wars began, aggression has often been rewarded. This one, in which incalculable numbers of lives on both sides have already been lost, and if it continues many more will be, must not be accorded the status of a moral lesson for the ages. The fact is that neither side seems capable of winning, so let's park the sermonising and look for the compromise in which so many wars – just wars as well as unjust ones – have always ended. And finally this: 'We owe it to the Ukrainian military dead, brave men and women whose lives were sacrificed for their country, not to settle for less than victory.' Well, if so, does Russia not owe it to the greater numbers of Russian military dead whose lives were sacrificed for their country too? What do we owe the British dead whose sacrifice in Afghanistan was also for a noble cause? This logic, applying as it must to both sides of any conflict, leads only to madness. None of us should be at all confident that Putin is ready to deal. I suspect otherwise. The greater likelihood is that in any negotiations he will fall back on Moscow's insistence that 'the root causes' of this conflict must be tackled. By this he means Ukraine's departure from the orbit of the Russian Federation. That is why security, not land, is what may prove the sticking point this time, because Ukraine's departure from Moscow's orbit must indeed be made secure. But if not this summer or this year, then next summer and next year, when the West's military support for Ukraine does not waver, and Moscow grows weary, this – security – must be at the heart of any negotiations. And those guarantees are up to us. Which brings me back to Zelensky. Who can blame him? Perhaps years of war, years of acute personal tension, years of sticking doggedly to your guns, years in the eye of the storm when your whole country's future rests on your shoulders, jam the flexibility of mind needed, not to fight but to deal. But there's a real danger now that Zelensky's apparent stubbornness over this 'not an inch' business may so infuriate a temperamental US President that American (and with it European) resolve begins to fray. Zelensky should not be digging in his heels on the question of land, and European nations, including our own, should not be encouraging him to. We probably can't save Ukraine without the Americans, and the Americans won't save Ukraine unless there's movement on conceding land. The Ukrainian President must get off his high horse, and Europe should stop indulging his intransigence. It's as simple as that.
