Entertainment
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Belgian beaches covered in litter after busy tropical summer dayThe tropical summer weather on Monday drew large crowds to the Belgian coast, resulting in plenty of beach fun and a vibrant atmosphere—but also a significant13 August 2024Read More...
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29 suspected drug dealers arrested at Tomorrowland festival, court hearings scheduledDuring the two weekends of the Tomorrowland festival in Boom, Antwerp province, authorities apprehended a total of 29 suspected drug dealers on and around the30 July 2024Read More...
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Cider Festival returns to Prague with over 100 varietiesAre you a fan of cider? Experience over 100 different varieties at the Cider Festival taking place on September 16 and 17.29 July 2024Read More...
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Tens of thousands celebrate at Rotterdam Summer CarnivalThe Summer Carnival in Rotterdam was celebrated with a joyful atmosphere, drawing tens of thousands of attendees to the city's center. The vibrant street parade,28 July 2024Read More...
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Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, Aya Nakamura: The Mystery Surrounding the Olympic Opening Ceremony ContinuesWith three days to go until the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, speculation is rampant about the participation of a world-renowned singer.23 July 2024Read More...
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Ostend mayor imposes swimming ban on popular beach due to safety concernsMayor Bart Tommelein of Ostend has imposed a swimming ban on a popular beach stretch due to the formation of dangerous sand ridges.22 July 2024Read More...
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Norway reopens select salmon rivers amid continued concerns over declining populationsAs of July 11, 2024, nearly half of the 33 salmon rivers previously closed for fishing in Central and Southern Norway will be reopened for limited fishing. However, stricter regulations will be19 July 2024Read More...
News
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German Chancellor defends border policy in call with Polish PMGerman Chancellor Olaf Scholz defended his government’s border policy during a call with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Friday, emphasizing the importance ofRead More...
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Record-breaking summer for Poland’s passenger train carrier PKP IntercityDuring the summer of 2024, PKP Intercity saw unprecedented growth, serving over 23 million passengers across Poland. The most popular routes connected majorRead More...
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French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire to become lecturer in SwitzerlandFrench Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has announced that he will begin teaching economics and geopolitics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, though heRead More...
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Support for Norway's monarchy declines amid growing controversyA recent survey reveals historically low support for Norway's monarchy, with only 40% of respondents opposing the idea that Crown Prince Haakon should be theRead More...
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Housing shortage worsens in SwitzerlandAs of June 1, Switzerland had 51,974 vacant homes, representing only 1.08% of the country's total housing stock, including apartments and single-family homes.Read More...
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Germany announces passport checks at all land borders to combat irregular migrationGermany's Interior Ministry has announced the introduction of nationwide passport checks at all land borders, aiming to tackle irregular migration and enhanceRead More...
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Uber drivers in Brussels to continue boycott over working conditionsUber drivers in Brussels have decided to extend their boycott into the following week after staging a mass disconnection last Friday, according to an announcementRead More...
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Rental prices surge across Belgium amid growing housing supply shortageThe private rental market in Belgium is slowing down due to a shortage of housing supply, according to a study by real estate federations CIB and Federia.Read More...
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Prague honors British hero who saved Jewish children from Nazis with street namingA new street in Prague’s 7th district has been named in honor of Nicholas Winton, the British man who tirelessly persuaded immigration authorities to grant visas for 669 Jewish children,Read More...
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News
British conductor Simon Rattle on Tuesday called for a new concert hall in London to make the city more competitive on the international music scene, as he takes up his baton at the London Symphony Orchestra.
He threw his weight behind a £280 million (324 million euro, $347 million) project aimed at creating a "Centre for Music" equipped for the digital era.
The plans involve building a new hall on the site of the Museum of London, which is relocating nearby, which would become the new home of the LSO.
Rattle, 61, will head the LSO from September while also conducting his final season at the Berlin Philharmonic until 2018.
London's Science Museum called upon the genius of late architect Zaha Hadid for the “huge challenge” of bringing life to its new gallery dedicated to mathematics, which opens on Thursday.
The Winton Gallery highlights the importance of mathematics through 120 objects, including a cash dispenser, the Enigma encryption machine, a model of a supertanker, a revolutionary aircraft and a 19th-century instrument for measuring tides.
Located in a regenerated old wing of the famous museum, the gallery was co-designed by celebrated Iraqi-British architect Hadid, who died of a heart attack in Miami in March before the gallery’s completion.
From Walkmans to iPhones and classic cars to robotic arms, London's new Design Museum will offer a journey through the world of contemporary design when it opens its doors to the public next week.
The museum in London's plush Kensington district is the culmination of an £83-million (97-million-euro, $103-million) project to transform a once derelict building.
"Our ambition is to create somewhere which would be a world centre for design and a place to start conversations about the world of design," museum director Deyan Sudjic told AFP on Thursday at a media preview.
The museum will house almost 1,000 objects in its permanent exhibition -- among them a London Underground train, a Ford Model T car, Gucci tennis shoes and Christian Louboutin's Pigalle high-heels -- covering everything from fashion to engineering.
The museum's new site is nearly three times the size of its previous home, which was a former banana warehouse in southeast London.
Fashion designer Stella McCartney unveiled her first menswear collection on Thursday at London's famous Abbey Road recording studio, where she promised men a more free and fun wardrobe.
McCartney chose to present the collection at the recording studio made famous by her father, Paul McCartney, and his three fellow Beatles when they named one of their albums after Abbey Road.
His fashion designer daughter referred to the 1969 album cover, which shows the band walking across Abbey Road, by parading models over the same white stripes to photographers' flashes.
McCartney said the venue was special both for its musical and family ties.
"It really means a lot to our family this studio... seeing and hearing what's been created here, the best music in the world.
"It's such an iconic place. So many people have recorded here," she said.
Bob Dylan, music legend and Nobel laureate, is also a prolific painter whose works depicting the landscapes and culture of the United States are now the focus of a major London exhibition.
Around 200 paintings by the US singer-songwriter, produced by the 75-year-old in the last two years, are on show from Saturday at the Halcyon Gallery in the British capital's plush Mayfair district.
The collection of oil, acrylic and watercolour paintings reveals a different side to Robert Allen Zimmerman, an icon of 20th century US popular music, whose poetic lyrics earned him the Nobel Prize for literature last month, to much surprise.
Dylan announced last week that he would travel to Stockholm to receive the prize, making the timing of this exhibition all the more apt.
"It's a great honour for us hosting the exhibition and for him to have received that honour at the same time," Paul Green, president of the Halcyon Gallery, told AFP.
Dylan began exploring the visual arts in the early 1960s. He designed the cover of the 1968 album "Music from Big Pink" by Canadian roots-rock group The Band.
More recently, his works have been exhibited in Milan and New York.
"Dylan has been passionate about art since he first moved to New York and was taken by his girlfriend Suze Rotolo around museums," said Green.
Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli performed Monday at the launch of a huge cultural center in Kuwait which includes a 2,000-seat opera house, the first in the oil-rich Gulf state.
Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad Al-Sabah opened the $750-million center and watched a spectacular show that combined international and local music.
Top Kuwaiti singers, artists and performers took part in the event which was also attended by a large number of local and foreign dignitaries.
The sprawling 215,000- square-meter center is located in the heart of the capital Kuwait City and comprises four buildings, a theater center, a music center, a conference center and a library for historical documents.
"You are sitting in the front row of the orchestra with the principal conductor Salonen conducting you," Luke Ritchie, the Philharmonia Orchestra's head of digital, told AFP.
"We wanted you to hear what it's like to sit in the viola section in the front of an orchestra, (for) people to get an insight of the dynamics."
Harry Potter fans were buzzing with excitement Saturday as "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child", a stage play that imagines the fictional boy wizard as a grown-up father of three, opened in London.
After nearly eight weeks of well-received preview performances, London's Palace Theatre hosted the opening gala as the general public were invited to strap themselves in for a new adventure in the saga that has captivated millions around the globe.
Arriving for the opening gala, creator J.K. Rowling told the Press Association she was "so happy" that fans had heeded her pleas to keep the plot a secret, and said she hoped the play would one day appear on Broadway.
Set 19 years after the events of Rowling's seventh and final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", the play sees a grown-up Potter working at the Ministry of Magic.
Recently a number of publications appeared in the Russian and Ukrainian press about Victor Nekrasov, devoted to the 105th anniversary of his birth on 17 June, 2016. He was remembered mostly as a Soviet writer and dissident, the author of one of the first truthful novels about World War II V okopakh Stalingrada, (In the Trenches of Stalingrad, 1946). I would like to focus my article on the role of Nekrasov in the heightening of public awareness about the Babi Yar massacre and the need to commemorate and memorialize the Holocaust in Kiev.
Victor Nekrasov was born in Kiev into a noble family in 1911. Nekrasov was a descendent of Russian, Italian and Swiss nobility. His grandmother Alina von Ern graduated from the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls and danced at the graduation ball with Tsar Alexander II. Nekrasov was quite proud of his noble ancestors and described them in his book Malen’kie portrety (Little Portraits).[1]
Victor Nekrasov’s mother Zinaida Nikolaevna Nekrasova (nee Motovilova, 1879-1970) was a distant relative of the poet Anna Akhmatova. Zinaida Nikolaevna was a very progressive woman for her time. While most noble women enjoyed a life of luxury and leisure, Zinaida decided to become a medical doctor. She studied medicine in Switzerland and worked for many years as a physician.[2] Victor remained close to his mother all of her life and Kievans often saw them walking together downtown. Less is known about Victor Nekrasov’s father, Platon Feodosievich, who died from a heart attack in 1917, when Victor was six years old. Victor’s mother and father separated when he was a small child. Zinaida Nikolaevna, with her two sons, Victor and his older brother Nikolai, lived in Switzerland and Paris before World War I and then in Kiev. Nekrasov’s father settled in Krasnoyarsk, where he worked as a bank clerk.[3] So perhaps Victor even did not remember his father.
In the 1930’s Nekrasov simultaneously studied architecture at the Kiev Civil Engineering Institute (now The Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture (KNUCA)) and theater art in the Theater Studio at the Kiev Russian Drama Theater. In 1936-38 he worked as the architect and then as actor, director, and stage artist in theaters in Vladivostok, Kirov, and Rostov-on-Don.
In August 1941 Victor voluntarily signed up for the Soviet Army. As an actor, he had been excused from service, but he asked the authorities to send him to the front. His request was granted and he served as an engineer and deputy commander of a sapper battalion until June 1944, when he was seriously wounded in his right arm, and with a disability was released from the army. Nekrasov described his military experience in his autobiographical book V okopakh Stalingrada, (In the Trenches of Stalingrad, 1946). It was one of the first honest war novels in Soviet literature, which described the war and the battle of Stalingrad without romanticism, as difficult and dangerous work, where unnecessary risks taken by commanders could cost many soldiers’ lives. The novel was published in the journal Znamia and nominated for a Stalin prize. However, the chairman of the Union of the Soviet Writers Aleksandr Fadeev did not like the novel and crossed it off the list of nominees. (Fadeev was a romantic and Nekrasov’s realistic approach to describing the war contradicted his romantic view). But somebody restored the novel to the list. The only one person could challenge the power of Fadeed over the Union of the Soviet Writers was Joseph Stalin. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, who was the editor of the journal Znamia, told this to Nekrasov when his book received the Stalin prize for literature in 1947.[4]
The novel was republished in the Soviet Union many times in millions of copies and translated into 36 languages. The novel was made into the film Soldaty (Soldiers, 1956); Nekrasov was the author of the screenplay. The film received an award at the Soviet movie festival.
Nekrasov at this point had reached the zenith of his writing career in the Soviet Union. He became the Deputy Chairman of the Union of Ukrainian Writers and lived in the elite Passage house on 25 Kreshchatik Street (near Maidan, Independence Square). On the first floor of the Passage building were expensive stores and restaurants, on the other floors the Kievan elite lived: composers, architects, artists and actors. However, Victor Nekrasov’s honesty, noble manners and his political naivety did not fit “the Soviet way of life.” Like a Kievan Don Quixote, he began his courageous but futile fight for historical justice. Of course he was defeated, expelled from the country and deprived of his Soviet citizenship. His struggle was doomed from the start, but Nekrasov did not understand this for a while, and he hoped to improve the society where he lived.
London's Tate Modern museum will this week unveil a vast pyramidal extension providing extra gallery space for the millions of guests who pour through its doors each year.
The modern art museum has been a roaring success since it opened in 2000, with more than five million people now annually visiting the former power station, whose silhouette looms over the south bank of the River Thames.
This is more than twice the number of visitors originally planned, leaving gallery-goers jostling to see the latest exhibitions and requiring more floor space.
Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, responsible for the building's original conversion, were chosen for the new "Switch House" project, which cost £260 million pounds ($367 million, 328 million euros).
The result is a fractured pyramid of cladded bricks in keeping with the building's industrial heritage.