Grab your gal pals! Romy and Michele: The Musical will premiere off Broadway this fall, with performances beginning October 14 ahead of an October 28 opening at Stage 42.
The show is adapted from cult classic 1997 movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, which stars Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow about two unsuccessful best friends invited to their 10-year reunion. They invent fake careers for themselves to impress the people who once bullied them, but it spectacularly backfires.
“Romy and Michele have been icons of friendship, fashion, and individuality from the moment we first met them,” said producers Barry Kemp and Stephen Soucy in a statement. “Bringing their story to the New York stage is the perfect home for their bold and quirky spirit to be reborn. We can’t wait for audiences to enjoy this hilarious and heart-filled new musical.”
Robin Schiff, who wrote the original screenplay, has adapted it for the musical, which also features an ’80s and ’90s-inspired original pop score by Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay (Orange Is the New Black), direction by Tony Award nominee Kristin Hanggi (Rock of Ages), and orchestrations by Keith Harrison Dworkin.
Cast and additional creative team members for the production have yet to be announced.
Check back for information on Romy and Michele: The Musical tickets on New York Theatre Guide.
When we think about what makes an audiobook memorable, it’s always the most human moments: a catch in the throat when tears are near, or words spoken through a real smile.
A Melbourne actor and audiobook narrator, Annabelle Tudor, says it’s the instinct we have as storytellers that makes narration such a primal, and precious, skill. “The voice betrays how we’re feeling really easily,” she says.
But as an art form it may be under threat.
In May the Amazon-owned audiobook provider Audible announced it would allow authors and publishers to choose from more than 100 voices created by artificial intelligence to narrate audiobooks in English, Spanish, French and Italian, with AI translation of audiobooks expected to be available later in the year – news that was met with criticism and curiosity across the publishing industry.
In Australia, where there are fewer audiobook companies and where emerging actors like Tudor rely on the work to supplement their incomes, there is growing concern about job losses, transparency and quality.
While Tudor, who has narrated 48 books, isn’t convinced that AI can do what she does just yet, she is worried that the poor quality may turn people away from the medium.
“I’ve narrated really raunchy sex scenes – AI doesn’t know what an orgasm sounds like,” she says. “Birth scenes as well – I’d love to know how they plan on getting around that.”
Audiobook giant Audible says it wants to use AI to complement, not replace, human narration. Photograph: M4OS Photos/Alamy
The audiobook boom
According to a 2024 report by NielsenIQ Bookdata, more than half of Australian audiobook consumers increased their listening over the past five years. Internationally there was a 13% increase in US audiobook sales between 2023 and 2024; in the UK audiobook revenue shot up to a new high of £268m, a 31% increase on 2023, the Publishers Association said.
As demand for audio content grows, companies are looking for faster – and cheaper – ways to make it. In January 2023 Apple launched a new audiobook catalogue of audiobooks narrated by AI. Later that year Amazon announced that self-published, US-based authors with works on Kindle could turn their ebooks into audiobooks using AI “virtual voice” technology – and there are now tens of thousands of these computer-generated audiobooks available through Audible.
And in February this year, as part of a more general shift towards audiobooks, Spotify said it would be accepting AI audiobooks to “lower the barrier to entry” for authors hoping to find more readers.
Audible says its aims are similar: to complement, not replace, human narration, allowing more authors and more titles to reach bigger audiences. In the US Audible is also testing a voice replica for audiobook narrators, to create dupes of their own voices that will “empower participants to expand their production capabilities for high-quality audiobooks”.
“In 2023 and 2024, Audible Studios hired more [human] narrators than ever before,” an Audible spokesperson told the Guardian. “We continue to hear from creators who want to make their work available in audio, reaching new audiences across languages.”
But robot narrators will always be cheaper than humans – and people in the voice acting and book industries fear a move to AI could pose a threat to workers.
Volume or quality?
Dorje Swallow’s career as a narrator took off after he began voicing novels by the Australian bestselling crime author Chris Hammer – and the actor has now narrated about 70 audiobooks. Swallow believes AI narration is a tool created by people who “don’t understand the value, technique and skills” required to produce quality audiobooks.
“We’ve done the hard yards and then some to get where we are, and to think you can just press a button and you’re going to get something of similar, or good enough quality, is kind of laughable,” he says.
Simon Kennedy, the president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, says there has always been a battle over how much a narrator deserves to be paid in Australia. For every finished hour of an audiobook, a narrator might spend double or triple that time recording it – and that doesn’t include an initial read to understand the book and its characters.
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“My personal opinion is that [introducing AI narrators] is going for volume over quality – and it’s looking to cheapen the process,” he says.
Kennedy founded the Australian Association of Voice Actors in 2024 in response to the threat being posed by AI. In a submission to a parliamentary committee last year the organisation said 5,000 Australian voice acting jobs were at risk.
He was hardly surprised about Audible’s announcement but says he thinks it’s a “pretty dumb move”.
“An audiobook narrator has such a special and intimate relationship with the listener that to try and do anything that is less connective is a foolish move,” he says.
As for the opportunity to clone their own voices, he says voice actors should have the right to engage – but they shouldn’t expect “any near the same pay rate, and they risk turning their unique timbre – their vocal brand – into a mass-produced robot voice that listeners get sick of listening to pretty quickly.”.
“If an emotionless narration at a consistent volume is all you need for ‘high-quality’, then sure,” he says. “But if engaging, gripping, edge-of-your-seat storytelling is your version of high-quality, then don’t hold your breath for AI to give you that.”
Another major concern is Australia’s lack of AI regulation. While the EU has its own AI Act, and China and Spain have labelling laws for AI-generated content, Australia is falling behind.
“There are no laws to prevent data scraping or non-consenting cloning of voices, or of creating deepfakes of people,” Kennedy says. “There are also no labelling laws or laws to mandate watermarking of AI-generated content and its origins; no laws to mandate transparency of training data; and no laws to dictate the appropriate use of AI-generated deepfakes, voice clones or text.”
Author Hannah Kent fears the use of AI will ‘cheapen things in a creative sense’. Photograph: Carrie Jones/The Guardian
This year the Burial Rites and Devotionauthor, Hannah Kent, was one of many acclaimed Australian writers shocked to discover their pirated work had been used to train Meta’s AI systems. She says while her initial reaction to the introduction of AI into creative spaces tends to be “refusal and outrage”, she’s curious about Audible’s AI announcement – specifically its plans to roll out beta testing for AI to translate text into different languages.
“I think it’s fairly obvious that the main reason to use AI would be for costs, and I think that’s going to cheapen things in a literal sense and cheapen things in a creative sense – in that sense of us honouring the storytelling, artistic and creative impulse,” Kent says.
Tudor and Swallow believe big companies will struggle to replace human narration completely, partly because many Australian authors will oppose it.
But whether or not listeners will be able to tell the difference remains to be seen.
“The foot is on the pedal to drive straight into dystopia,” Tudor says. “Can we just listen to people instead of robots?”
James Cameron has described Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s multi-Oscar-winning 2023 biopic about the atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer, a “moral cop-out”.
Speaking to Deadline about his forthcoming project Ghosts of Hiroshima, about the effects of the bomb in that city, Cameron said he disagreed with Nolan’s narrative choices. “It’s interesting what he stayed away from,” said Cameron. “Look, I love the film-making, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop-out.”
In Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy stars as the scientist who led the development and design of the atomic bomb during the second world war. The film covers its inception, testing and deployment in Japan in 1945, when the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the deaths of as many as a quarter of a million people by the end of that year – as well as hastening the end of the conflict.
The film depicts Oppenheimer after the war as increasingly wracked by the legacy of his invention, and haunted by images of suffering. However, Cameron said he was among those viewers who felt the film did not go far enough in depicting the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
“It’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects,” he said. “I don’t like to criticise another film-maker’s film, but there’s only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience, and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him.
“But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don’t know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn’t want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I’m just stupid that way.”
Oppenheimer was released in 2023 and won Oscars for best picture, director, leading actor (for Murphy), supporting actor (for Robert Downey Jr), and three others. It also made $975m (£720m) at the box office.
At the time of its release, Nolan responded to criticism similar to that put forward by Cameron by explaining he wanted to represent Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. “It was always my intention to rigidly stick to that,” he told Variety. “Oppenheimer heard about the bombing at the same time that the rest of the world did.
Christopher Nolan, centre, and Cillian Murphy, right, during the making of Oppenheimer. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
“I wanted to show somebody who is starting to gain a clearer picture of the unintended consequences of his actions. It was as much about what I don’t show as what I show.”
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Deadline’s Mike Fleming put a rhetorical rebuttal to Cameron, saying Nolan may have reasoned a different film-maker would tell the story of the victims of the bombings in Japan. “Okay, I’ll put up my hand,” said Cameron. “I’ll do it, Chris. No problem. You come to my premiere and say nice things.”
Cameron’s film, which has not yet begun formal production, will be an adaptation of Charles Pellegrino’s forthcoming nonfiction book Ghosts of Hiroshima, which brings together testimonies from victims and survivors of the attacks.
Before then he will release the latest Avatar film, Fire and Ash. His first entry in that franchise is the highest-grossing film of all time, while the sequel is the third. Avengers: Endgame is the second highest-grossing film, but Cameron’s 1997 disaster movie Titanic is the fourth.
In a candid interview on Elizabeth Day’s “How to Fail” podcast, Melinda Gates shared the pivotal moment when she knew her marriage to Microsoft founder Bill Gates was beyond repair. Reflecting on her relationship, Melinda revealed that she initially ignored the warning signs, attributing them to external factors outside their marriage.
“I kept pushing it away,” Melinda admitted, recalling moments when doubts surfaced. Despite these feelings, she continued to believe in their shared work, particularly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which they co-founded and which remains a cornerstone of their legacy.
However, as Bill’s infidelity became known, Melinda acknowledged that she could no longer ignore the reality of her situation. “At some point, I had to turn towards it, and I just knew it in my soul,” she confessed, marking the point when she realised their relationship had come to an end.
She emphasized the difficulty of leaving, as she takes marriage seriously, noting that it wasn’t just about the two of them but also their three children—Jennifer, 29, Rory, 26, and Phoebe, 22. “It’s two people who’ve come together, hopefully in love… so pulling it apart later is really hard,” Melinda said, reflecting on the emotional toll.
Melinda, 60, also encouraged others to trust their intuition, even when it means facing painful decisions. The couple married in 1994 but announced their separation in May 2021, finalising their divorce by August. The separation followed reports of Bill’s affair with a Microsoft employee.
Since the divorce, Melinda has found new love with tech entrepreneur Philip Vaughn, while Bill, 69, is dating Paula Hurd, widow of the late Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd.
1. Singer Casandra ‘Cassie’ Ventura took the stand for four days
Ventura, widely viewed as the prosecution’s key witness, testified over four days during the trial’s first week while eight and a half months pregnant.
The singer, who dated Combs on and off from 2007 to 2018, alleged that during their relationship, Combs physically abused her and coerced and blackmailed her into participating in drug-fueled sex marathons with male escorts, referred to as “freak offs” – which she said Combs orchestrated, directed, watched, masturbated to and sometimes filmed.
She shared graphic details about the sexual encounters. She told jurors that Combs controlled most aspects of her life and was frequently violent with her. Ventura said that he would threaten to release explicit videos of her and stifle her career if she defied him, and alleged that he raped her after their 2018 breakup.
On cross-examination, Combs’s attorneys portrayed her as a consenting participant in the “freak-offs”. They also presented dozens of messages between the two, including explicit texts and others in which she appeared to speak positively about the encounters.
2. Another one of Combs’s former girlfriends told the court that she was coerced taking part in the ‘freak-offs’
A woman testifying under the pseudonym “Jane”, who dated Combs from 2021 until his 2024 arrest, took the stand in weeks four and five of the trial.
Much of her testimony echoed Ventura’s, describing the frequent “freak-offs”, or “hotel nights” she said was pressured by Combs to participate in.
Jane said she initially participated to please Combs but later felt “obligated” after he began paying her rent. Jane told the court that she feared she’d lose her home, where she lived with her son, if she refused and that Combs used the rent payments as leverage over her.
She said she repeatedly told Combs she no longer wanted to participate, but that he was dismissive. She also described a violent altercation between her and Combs in 2024 that left her with a black eye.
Under cross-examination, Combs’s attorneys portrayed Jane, as they did with Ventura, as a consenting participant. They cited texts in which Jane seemed to speak positively about the encounters.
The attorneys also noted that Jane sometimes arranged the encounters herself. Jane said that she did so to retain some control over who was involved.
3. A former employee testified that Combs sexually and physically assaulted her
A former personal assistant to Combs, testifying as “Mia”, told jurors that during her employment, Combs sexually and physically assaulted her multiple times.
She described the incidents as “random”, “sporadic” and “so oddly spaced out” that she believed that each time was the last. She said she felt “trapped” in the situation and feared retaliation.
On cross-examination, Combs’s lawyer suggested that she fabricated the claims, and also pointed to social media posts and messages from Mia after the alleged assaults in which she is seen praising Combs.
4. Kid Cudi testified that Combs broke into his house
Rapper Scott Mescudi, known as Kid Cudi, who briefly dated Ventura in 2011, testified in week two that Combs broke into his home after discovering the relationship.
Weeks later, Mescudi’s car was firebombed, which Mescudi believes was Combs – an allegation Combs and his lawyers deny.
5. A former employee testified that Combs kidnapped her at gunpoint
Capricorn Clark, a former employee of Combs’s, testified that on the morning of the alleged break-in at Mescudi’s home, Combs “kidnapped” her while holding a gun. She said he then forced her to accompany him to Mescudi’s home, telling her he was going “to kill” Mescudi.
During her employement, Clark said Combs threatened her, subjected her to lie detector tests, and once pushed her.
6. The judge threatened to remove Combs from the courtroom
On 5 June, the judge overseeing the case, Judge Arun Subramanian, warned that he would remove Combs from court if he continued to interact with the jury.
During the lunch break that day, after the jury left the room, Subramanian said he saw Combs looking at the jury and “nodding vigorously” during the cross-examination of Bryana Bongolan, a former graphic designer for Combs and a longtime friend Ventura.
The judge cautioned Combs’s lawyers that if he saw it again, it “could result in the exclusion of your client from the courtroom”.
“There should be no efforts whatsoever to have an interaction with this jury,” the judge said.
Combs’s lawyer assured the judge that it would not happen again.
Eddy Garcia, a former security guard at an InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles, testified in early June that Combs and his team sought to acquire the 2016 surveillance footage showing Combs assaulting Ventura at the hotel.
Garcia testified that Combs gave him $100,000, which he split among hotel security staff, in exchange for the footage and said that he signed a nondisclosure agreement.
The footage was released by CNN last year, though it remains unclear how CNN obtained the video.
After the video’s release last year, Combs took to social media to publicly apologize for his behavior in the footage.
The video was played several times for the jurors during the trial.
8. Kanye West briefly showed up at the courthouse
Kanye West, legally known as Ye, briefly visited Combs’s trial on 13 June to show support for Combs.
He didn’t stay long. West was reportedly directed to an overflow room, and left shortly after through the front entrance. He was then seen getting into a car and driving away.
During closing arguments, Ye released a song with one of Combs’s sons titled ‘Diddy Free’.
9. A juror was dismissed over conflicting statements about his residency
On 17 June, the judge dismissed a juror over conflicting residency claims.
The juror, identified as Juror 6, reportedly claimed during jury selection that he lived in the Bronx. He later told court staff he lived in New Jersey, making him ineligible for the New York jury.
“The record raised serious concerns as to the juror’s candor and whether he shaded answers to get on and stay on the jury,” Subramanian said in court.
Combs’s legal team opposed the juror’s removal. They argued that Combs would be “severely prejudiced” if Juror 6, who they said was one of two Black men on the jury, were removed.
The alternate juror who replaced him was a white man from Westchester, New York.
10. Jurors watched videos of ‘freak-off’ sex marathons
Jurors were shown video clips of the so-called “freak-offs”– the multi-day sex marathons with male escorts.
Due to their graphic content, only jurors, the prosecution, defense and Combs could watch and hear the videos, all wearing headphones.
Reporters and the public were barred from viewing or hearing them. The clips lasted several minutes and the jurors largely kept their reactions muted.
With “Squid Game” Season 3 now breaking Netflix records globally, the local-first philosophy championed by Netflix Korea content chief Don Kang has been dramatically vindicated.
“We never expected it to be Netflix’s number one show globally, ever,” Kang tells Variety. “But it happened by really focusing on what we have told ourselves to focus on, which is to have the local teams work on local stories with local creators for the local audiences.”
The Korean survival drama’s latest season shattered Netflix records with over 60 million views in three days and became the first show to rank No. 1 in all 93 countries where Netflix maintains Top 10 lists during its debut week. For Kang, Netflix’s VP of Content for Korea, the show’s unprecedented success validates a philosophy of authentic storytelling over manufactured global appeal.
“If you start writing or trying to come up with something that will resonate to non-local audiences where you have no exposure to the culture, you’re basically writing to an imaginary audience,” explains Kang, who grew up in Indonesia but spent significant time in Korea. “What they’re accustomed to, the stories that they want to tell, are basically influenced by the stories that they were exposed to growing up.”
Despite the pressure that might come with such massive global success, Kang sees no creative risk in continuing to work with emerging filmmakers. “People are looking for new stories. They want to bring stories that our fans and members didn’t even know they wanted to watch. So new stories are very likely to come from new creators,” he says.
This approach has yielded projects like “Lost in Starlight,” marking director Han Ji-won’s first major feature animation with Netflix. Kang noted the scarcity of adult-targeted Korean animation in recent years, with the last notable films coming from director Yeon Sang-ho, who has since moved primarily into live action.
“When we met director Han and saw her works, it was just the right chance for us to give her a chance to really do her first big feature animation,” Kang says. The strategy extends beyond animation, with Netflix also supporting emerging live-action directors like Kim Tae-joon, the filmmaker behind “Wall to Wall,” his second feature following “Unlocked.”
“We have just a handful of very famous directors in Korea established already, but then there’s this big gap of generation after that,” Kang observes. “We are all about nurturing this new layer of young, talented creators.”
Kang has witnessed firsthand how Netflix’s global standards have elevated Korean production quality. The transformation is stark compared to traditional Korean broadcast television, where shows would begin airing with only a handful of completed scripts and writers delivering pages on the day of shooting.
“Sometimes we spend more time doing post-production versus the actual production shooting itself,” Kang says. “That enables the creators to have more time to really unleash their creativity to the full during the production process, and also enables the actors to portray more faithful characters.”
This methodology has attracted international attention. Hong Kong-American actor Byron Mann, who recently starred in the Korean film “Big Deal,” noted the elaborate storyboarding process that resembled manga comics — a marked difference from Hollywood production methods.
Netflix’s emphasis on extensive pre-production planning and robust post-production work represents a significant shift for an industry previously constrained by tight broadcast schedules and limited resources.
Meanwhile, as vertical video content explodes globally — with China’s micro drama market valued at $6.9 billion in 2024 — Kang remains thoughtfully cautious about the format’s potential.
“I haven’t given much thought about doing it,” he says. “There was a moment maybe a couple of years ago in Korea that lots of people were talking about it, but then it lost traction. I don’t see Netflix immediately jumping into that sector. It will naturally evolve, so I look forward to witnessing that.”
For now, Kang’s focus remains on the proven formula that transformed Korean content from a regional specialty into a global phenomenon: empowering local creators to tell authentic stories that resonate first at home, then capture hearts worldwide through Netflix’s global distribution infrastructure.
With “Squid Game” Season 3’s unprecedented success serving as the latest validation of this approach, Kang and Netflix Korea continue building the foundation for the next generation of global Korean hits.
Kirkland & Ellis advised Shadowbox Studios, an industry leader in sound stage facilities, on the £250 million loan in relation to the refinancing of Shinfield Studios, a UK film/TV studio and production hub with nearly one million square feet of studio space.
The Kirkland team included debt finance lawyers Kazik Michalski, Lucy Hartland and Nigel Chiang; tax lawyers James Seddon and Abigail Curry; technology & IP transactions lawyers Jacqueline Clover and Nara Yoo; corporate lawyers Annette Baillie and Jin Yi Lee; and real estate lawyers David Stanek and TJ Kuban.
Jury delivers a mixed verdict: guilty of transportation to engage in prostitution but not of sex-trafficking or RICO
The jury has founded Combs:
NOT GUILTY of Racketeering conspiracy
NOT GUILTY of the sex trafficking of Casandra Ventura
NOT GUILTY of the sex trafficking of “Jane.”
GUILTY of the transportation to engage in prostitution, related to Casandra Ventura
GUILTY of the transportation to engage in prostitution related to “Jane”
Key events
The foreperson will now read the verdict.
The jury is in the courtroom and the foreperson has given the verdict form to the court deputy.
The jurors are now filing into the courtroom.
“We have reached a verdict on all counts” the note from the jury reads.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs enters courtroom ahead of verdict
Sean Combs has just entered the courtroom. His family are also present in court.
The jury has deliberated for just over 13 hours in total.
Key moments from Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ trial
As we await the verdict, here are some key moments from the trial:
Casandra “Cassie” Ventura gave harrowing details of her time with Sean “Diddy” Combs in her testimony, including when he assaulted her in 2016 in a Los Angeles hotel corridor which was caught on surveillance camera.
Ventura told the court Combs raped her in 2018 after their breakup. The trial heard Combs told her “he was going to hurt” her and Scott Mescudi, known as the rapper Kid Cudi, when he heard they were dating. Ventura testified that Combs was also violent towards those who worked for him. He would assault some of his employees and attack her friends. In addition to punching people and slamming them into furniture, Ventura said that Combs once dangled one of her friends over a balcony.
Ventura also said that Combs would regularly threaten to publicize videos of her participating in his “freak-offs”. She testified that once on her birthday, Combs reminded her of the videos after she refused to leave her friends and join him in a freak-off. “I feared for my career, my family … It is horrible and disgusting, no one should do that to anyone,” she said.
The “freak-offs” could last two to four days sometimes – with no sleep. Drugs would help them stay awake, Ventura testified. Still, she told the court “I was in love and wanted to make him happy” and “I didn’t know what no could turn into.”
Ventura recalled that Combs had guns in safes in his multiple homes, which alarmed her. She cited one particular incident during which Combs made her carry one of the guns, something he did on multiple occasions, which “terrified” her.
Dawn Richard, a former member of the pop group Danity Kane, also told the court she witnessed Combs physically abuse Cassie Ventura.
Kid Cudi testified that Combs broke into his home in 2011 after discovering that he was dating Combs’s former girlfriend, singer Casandra “Cassie”Ventura, and told the court how a molotov cocktail was thrown at his car a few weeks later.
A former employee of Combs told the trial that he repeatedly threatened her and once forced her to accompany him to the home of Kid Cudi, who Combs allegedly said he was going to “kill”.
Cassie Ventura’s mother, Regina Ventura, told the court she was “scared about my daughter’s safety” and revealed that she had paid Combs $20,000 “to recoup money he had spent” on her daughter “because he was unhappy she was in a relationship with Kid Cudi”.
Bryana Bongolan, a longtime friend ofVentura told the trial the hip-hop mogul dangled herfrom the balcony of a 17th-floor apartment in 2016.
At one point, Judge Arun Subramanian threatened to remove Combs from court, saying he saw him looking at the jury and “nodding vigorously” during the cross-examination of Bryana Bongolan.
The judge presiding trial dismissed a juror in June over conflicting statements about his residency.
The defense for Sean “Diddy” Combs maintained that all sexual activity was consensual and part of a “swingers lifestyle”.
They claimed he was being wrongly prosecuted for his private sex life.
Over the course of the seven-week trial, US prosecutors accused Combs of operating his business empire as a criminal enterprise to carry out and conceal crimes including sex-trafficking, kidnapping, arson, bribery, enticement to engage in prostitution, and obstruction of justice. Combs did this, they alleged, with help from employees and close associates.
The government called 34 witnesses to the stand.
A verdict has been reached in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial
The jury in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex-trafficking trial has reached a verdict, they said Wednesday morning.
The jury, composed of eight men and four women, have told the court that they have reached a decision in the case after deliberating since Monday.
The deliberations began on Monday, 30 June.
On Tuesday evening, the jury announced that it had reached a partial verdict, and had come to a decision with regards to four of the five counts – two counts of sex trafficking and two counts transportation to engage in prostitution. But, the jury said that they were unable to come to a decision on the racketeering conspiracy charge.
OnWednesday, the jury announced that it had come to decision on that remaining count.
Combs, 55, was arrested last September, and had pleaded not guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex-trafficking and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He has remained incarcerated without bail in a federal detention facility in Brooklyn since his September arrest.
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has had his Australian visa canceled after he released “Heil Hitler,” a song promoting Nazism, the country’s home affairs minister said on Wednesday.
The US rapper released the song that praised the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler across social media and music streaming platforms in May.
The song came a few months after Ye made a string of antisemitic posts on X, which included comments such as “I love Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said that while previous offensive comments made by Ye had not affected his visa status, officials reviewed it again after the song’s release.
“It was a lower level (visa) and the officials still looked at the law and said you’re going to have a song and promote that sort of Nazism, we don’t need that in Australia,” he told national broadcaster ABC on Wednesday.
“We have enough problems in this country already without deliberately importing bigotry.”
Burke added that Ye had family in Australia and had been a longtime visitor prior to the visa cancellation. The singer married his wife Bianca Censori, an Australian architect, in December 2022.
Burke’s office declined to comment on the exact date of the visa cancellation. Ye’s management did not respond immediately to a request for comment outside US business hours.
In October 2024, US conservative influencer Candace Owens was also barred from entry into Australia. Burke said “Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.”
Seemingly out of nowhere, Indigenous art is everywhere. We’ve gone decades – centuries, really – in this country with barely any exhibitions dedicated to the work of Indigenous artists, but recently, everything’s changed. Galleries, museums and institutions across the UK are hosting shows by artists from communities in South America, Australia, the US and Europe at an unprecedented rate.
Tate Modern in London is putting on its first-ever major solo show by a First Nation Australian artist in July, with a Sámi artist from Norway taking over the Turbine Hall in October. There are shows by Native American artists at Camden Art Centre in London and Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, while painters and weavers from the Amazon and Argentina are coming to Manchester’s Whitworth and Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion.
Speculative apparatus 2 for the work of nohkompan by Duane Linklater. Photograph: Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
This explosion in attention is at least partly thanks to the 2024 Venice Biennale. The most recent edition of the art world’s ultimate taste-making event was a big, bold celebration of Indigenous art on a scale most western audiences had never encountered before. It was, quite appropriately and relatively humorously, called Foreigners Everywhere.
The usual Jeff Koons-ian glitz, hazy figuration, hyper-academic conceptualism and postmodern abstraction of the contemporary art world was swapped for tapestries from South America, mythological drawings from northern Canada and swirling, mesmerising paintings from rural Australia.
One Golden Lion, the Biennale’s top prize, was awarded to Kamilaroi/Bigambul Australian artist Archie Moore, who created a dizzyingly celestial family tree, detailing 65,000 years of ancestry in chalk on black walls – a near endless journey through familial time and space.
The other Golden Lion went to Mataaho Collective, a group of Māori women from New Zealand, for an installation of crisscrossing strands of fabric straps that cast interlocking shadows as you entered the main exhibition. Arguably the greatest accolades in art, both awarded to Indigenous artists.
Which isn’t to say that all of this attention and praise is a totally new phenomenon. “Australian First Nations’ art has been receiving international attention for decades and is no longer considered just a niche market or as specialised art,” says Kelli Cole, a Warumungu and Luritja curator who’s organising Tate Modern’s big summer celebration of the art of the late Emily Kam Kngwarray.
Aboriginal art and its distinctive dot painting-style first started making waves in the wider art world in the 1970s, and has steadily grown in popularity – and acceptance – ever since. Kngwarray’s huge, seemingly abstract paintings and textiles (also currently on display in a smaller exhibition at Pace Gallery in London) have all the hallmarks of what audiences associate with Aboriginal art: dots and lines in bright whites, earthy ochres and sun-drenched yellows, intersecting and weaving together to create dreamy, hallucinatory visions of wide open terrain and ancestral lands, or what Aboriginal people call “Country”.
For a lot of viewers, part of the appeal of Aboriginal art is the superficial similarities to western abstraction, but the work has deeper meaning. “The dot painting style is a sophisticated visual language derived from Country. It’s a practice informed by generations of deep knowledge, designed to communicate vital information,” says Cole. “For First Nations people, Country is not just land; it’s a living entity, encompassing spiritual, social and geographical origins, inextricably linked to identity and responsibility. Artists like Kngwarray visually articulate this profound connection, inviting global audiences to understand art not as detached objects, but as expressions of custodianship, belonging and a continuous reciprocal relationship with ancestral lands.”
Younger Indigenous Australian artists, however, have moved away from the more traditional approach of painters such as Kngwarray. “I have a lot of respect for the old people – their strong culture, their knowledge and their art – but a young fella like me doesn’t want to make traditional paintings,” says Vincent Namatjira, a Western Aranda artist whose satirical, political approach to portraiture has seen him receive both praise (he was the first Indigenous winner of the Archibald prize for Australian portraiture) and a hefty amount of controversy.
He comes from a long line of artists – his great-grandfather was the hugely influential watercolourist Albert Namatjira – and uses his joyful, colourful portraits to lampoon the wealthy and powerful, taking aim at British royalty, Captain Cook and Australian billionaires (one of whom, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, tried to have his “unflattering” portrait of her removed from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia last year and “permanently disposed of”).
Namatjira also uses his work to celebrate important figures in his community. “For me, portraying these Indigenous heroes is about equal recognition. I want to make sure that Indigenous leaders are properly recognised and acknowledged. My three daughters are all growing up now and I want them, and other Aboriginal kids, to be able to see these strong examples of Indigenous leadership, to feel proud and empowered.”
‘Unflattering’ …. a portrait of Gina Rinehart donated to NGA and a portrait of Gina Rinehart by Australian artist Vincent Namatjira Composite: National Gallery of Australia / EPA
His political approach is one that resonates with a lot of Indigenous North American artists. Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith – a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana who died earlier this year – currently has a show at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, and an exhibition due to open at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh in November. Her work combined pop appropriation, mixed-media modernism and Indigenous culture “to remind viewers that Native Americans are still alive”.
Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist from Ontario, Canada, with a show opening at Camden Art Centre this month, makes minimal installations intended to “create space for Indigenous presence in every moment”. Art, for many Indigenous people, is a tool of resistance, and a way of affirming their existence.
Claudia Alarcón is an Indigenous artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people in northern Argentina, where she leads a collective called Silät, bringing together 100 female weavers to create colourful tapestries filled with references to animals and nature. There are footprints, eyes, trees, all arranged into stunning, abstract geometric compositions. Their work is on show at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.
Claudia Alarcón and Silät Tayhin at De La Warr Pavilion. Photograph: Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin, 2025, Installation View, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-On-Sea. Photography: Rob Harris
“We chose the name Silät because it is a word in our language which can be translated as ‘message’ or ‘announcement’,” she says. “For us, it is a message of presence. It is a manifestation, like a whisper, of the strength of our knowledge. Our weavings are a proclamation that we continue to defend our memory, our territory, united. Indigenous existence is constantly under threat. We are walking a new path, telling new stories, but all of this is part of the long-standing defence of our culture, which is always present. Always.”
Defence is important, because Indigenous lands are under critical threat from exploitative commercial parties, and also more widely from climate change. Santiago Yahuarcani – a leader of the Aimeni clan of the Uitoto in Peru whose exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester opens this month – addresses that threat head-on in his work, with gorgeous, chaotic canvases that paint nature in a constant, violent battle with man, lamenting the brutal destruction of the Amazon, and calling desperately for change.
It’s an approach shared by Norwegian Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara, whose previous work has seen her place a pile of bloodstained, bullet-pierced reindeer skulls outside the Norwegian parliament. She will be taking on the Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern in October. “I fear the path we’re currently walking globally, as a human species, is failing,” she says. “The understanding that nature sustains life is fading from human consciousness. I’m trying to puncture the reality that we’ve been sold. I believe that Indigenous philosophy can offer collective strategies to protect life for the future; to rethink and re-understand our place within a larger system.”
Lumping such an incredibly diverse array of artists into one big, sweeping “Indigenous art” bracket is obviously problematic. But there are themes that connect these communities, and to an extent their art, around the world. “I see myself as part of something larger. I know there are other groups, with other languages, who are my brothers and sisters, with whom we share a history of struggle, and also of pain,” says Alarcón. “What matters most is to keep fighting for our rights and our memories, which are also the rights of our territory.”
Whether in Norway, Peru, Canada or Australia, Indigenous artists are united not just by a shared connection to the land and its custodianship, but by having survived centuries of colonial subjugation, capitalist exploitation and ongoing climate annihilation. Proof of their endurance will be written across the walls of galleries across the UK this year, in powerful, political and often incredibly beautiful art.
