Category: 5. Entertainment

ISLAMABAD – The British Council supported a vibrant collaboration between the Faiz Foundation Trust (Pakistan) and the Bradford Literature Festival (UK) to co-curate a special Faiz Festival programme as part of the BLF 2025 edition.

The partnership brought the spirit and legacy of the celebrated Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz to UK audiences, in a festival renowned for championing diverse voices and narratives. As part of this collaboration, three bespoke sessions honoured Faiz’s life, work, and enduring relevance, showcasing his literary influence across poetry, music, and visual arts.

James Hampson, Country Director of the British Council Pakistan, said: “We’re proud to provide an opportunity for people to hear more about Faiz Ahmed Faiz. New collaborations, building on old connections between the UK and Pakistan, will showcase our shared cultural heritage. Introducing established and new talent from Pakistan to British audiences is important to us, and we’re pleased to be supporting Bradford 2025 – UK City of Culture.”

Moneeza Hashmi, Media Expert and Faiz Foundation Trustee, said: “My father, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, has always been a poet beyond borders, speaking to the hearts of people across cultures and nations. Now, through the Faiz Foundation, we’re taking his legacy across the world, sharing his poetry and ideals with broader audiences. It’s a privilege to be part of this journey, and I’m thrilled to see his words continue to inspire and unite people globally.

The sessions included:

• An evening with acclaimed actors and Faiz’s grandchildren Adeel and Mira Hashmi, interweaving dramatic readings of Faiz’s work with live ghazal performances by the versatile singer Priti Kaur.
• A conversation between noted curator and artist Salima Hashmi, broadcaster Moneeza Hashmi, and academic Prof. Saeed Khan, exploring how Faiz’s poetry has inspired visual art across generations.
• A panel discussion on poetic resistance and solidarity across borders, connecting Faiz’s legacy with that of Neruda, Darwish, Qabbani, and Preti Taneja, through shared themes of justice, dignity, and human resilience.

In addition to the Faiz Festival sessions, audiences were also treated to a Qawwali performance by Najmuddin-Saifuddin Qawwal, masters of the devotional Sufi tradition.

The collaboration is part of the wider arts programming for Bradford 2025 – UK City of Culture, where the British Council is supporting groundbreaking new work by Pakistani artist Meherunnisa Asad, whose installation for Wild Uplands is already drawing attention across national UK media.

Through these initiatives, the British Council continues its commitment to bringing artists and audiences together from Pakistan and the UK to share and exchange creative ideas, fostering mutual understanding and showcasing the richness of contemporary Pakistani culture on the world stage.

 
Rohner: We’ve worked with several hundred thousand people over the past 60-some-odd years on every continent except Antarctica, and while doing that, we’ve learned many lessons about what we’re like and not like as human beings. The beauty of the work we do is that we can now empirically document three things, among others. First, humans everywhere – in any place in the world that we’ve found so far – understand themselves to be cared about or not cared about in the same four ways. So far, no exceptions. Second, if you feel the person or people who are most important to you – these are usually parents when we’re kids and intimate partners when we’re adults, but there could be others like teachers or coaches – if you feel that person doesn’t really want you, appreciate you, care about you, love you, if you feel rejected by that person, most people will respond in exactly the same way. A cluster of 10 things start to happen. We get anxious, insecure. We have anger problems. Our self-esteem is impaired. Children can have issues of cognitive distortions, in which they start to think about themselves in distorted ways. The third important lesson comes from Sumbleen’s work.

Ali: I came to UConn as a psychology student and enjoyed working with Ron so much that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in human development and family sciences. In conversations about IPARTheory, we developed an argument that parental acceptance and rejection might be rooted in our shared biocultural evolution, and I wanted to investigate how that shows up in the brain. This became the focus of my dissertation – the first in affective neuroscience at UConn – under the guidance of my Ph.D. advisors, Preston Britner and Ron Rohner. The research examined how early parental experiences shape emotional regulation. We scanned the brains of students who reported either parental acceptance or rejection while they played a simulated ball-tossing game designed to mimic social exclusion. Those with rejection histories showed more activity in areas linked to emotion and memory, suggesting they were re-experiencing past rejection. Participants who felt loved showed more activation in regions tied to rational thinking, possibly reframing the experience. Now, we’re analyzing resting-state brain data to see whether differences in brain connectivity appear even without an external task.

London
CNN
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The British royal family’s train will be retired by 2027, as part of a cost-saving measure announced by Buckingham Palace on Monday after “a thorough review into its use and value for money.”

The monarchy has been using its own rail travel since Queen Victoria first boarded a specially built carriage from Slough, England, to London Paddington Station in 1842. The current royal train, which has nine carriages that include sleeping quarters and an office, was introduced in 1977 for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.

But the costs of royal rail travel rack up quickly, according to the Royal Household’s annual accounts report, which showed that a visit by the King to the English county of Staffordshire in February cost £44,822 ($61,800). Another trip to the Cheshire headquarters of luxury automaker Bentley last year cost more than £33,000 ($45,700). There are also hefty costs associated with storing the royal train at a secure facility in Wolverton, England.

The decision to decommission the train was partly due to “the significant level of investment which would be required to keep the Royal Train in operation beyond 2027,” the report said. Meanwhile, two helicopters provide “a reliable alternative,” it stated. The royals took more than 140 helicopter journeys over the year, with an average cost per trip of around £3,370 ($4,600).

The announcement of the train’s retirement was part of the annual financial statement released by the British Royal Household, which revealed that the annual lump sum it received from the government remained at £86.3 million ($118.50 million).

The sum, called the Sovereign Grant, pays for the upkeep of royal palaces and the royals’ official duties and is funded by British taxpayer money. In return, the monarch hands over all profits from the Crown Estate — which includes vast swathes of central London property, the Ascot Racecourse and the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland — to the government, in an arrangement dating back to 1760.

The Sovereign Grant functions like an expense account for the monarch and their representatives, covering the costs of their public duties, including travel, staff, and upkeep of historic properties. Notably, it excludes funding for security, which also incurs a high cost given the royals’ numerous public engagements and events.

Royal family members undertook more than “1,900 public engagements in the UK and overseas, while more than 93,000 guests attended 828 events at Official Royal Palaces,” the annual Sovereign Grant Report said.

The total grant of £86.3 million ($118.50 million), which by law remains the same as the three previous financial years, is comprised of a £51.8 million ($71.1 million), core grant and £34.5 million ($47.4 million) to fund the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.

Buckingham Palace, a top tourist attraction in central London, is undergoing a major modernization project that will see upgrades to electric cabling, pipework, elevators and accessible bathrooms.

The report also said the Royal Household will increase its use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and continue the electrification of its fleet of vehicles.

Last year, the Royal Household announced it aimed to transition to an “almost fully electric” fleet of vehicles, without providing a target date. Britain’s PA Media reported that the King’s two Bentleys would be modified to run on biofuel.

The royal family’s three main sources of income are the Sovereign Grant, the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall estates and their personal property and investments.

The level of funding for the British royal family has long fueled criticism, with one anti-monarchy group calling for the Sovereign Grant to be abolished and for the British public to keep all the profits of the Crown Estate.

“The grant system is mad. Funding goes up not because of any need for extra money, but because the grant is linked to government profits from land managed by the Crown Estate,” Graham Smith, a campaigner for the group Republic, said in a statement earlier this year. “The palace has recycled the excuse of needing the money for refurbishment of Buckingham Palace, an excuse used to double the grant ten years ago.”

“It’s time that half a billion pounds was put to good use, that there was proper accounting for the cost of the monarchy and for that cost to be slashed to just a few million pounds,” Smith added.

The Keeper of the Privy Purse, James Chalmers, said in a statement on Monday as the report was released: “Soft power is hard to measure but its value is, I believe, now firmly understood at home and abroad, as the core themes of the new reign have come into even sharper focus, and the Royal Family have continued in their service to the nation, Realms and Commonwealth.”

This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.

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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the novelists Tash Aw and Jemimah Wei, who connected when Jemimah signed up for Tash’s fiction master class on “time and place” in Singapore back in 2015.

Growing up in Malaysia and Singapore, Tash and Jemimah remember having almost no models for what it might look like to be a writer. The publishing industry – and the literary world – seemed to be headquartered elsewhere. This is why it was so important to Tash to return to his region to teach: to show young writers there what was possible.

After Jemimah had been writing for a while, Tash suggested Jemimah look into graduate school in creative writing, and later he connected her with his literary agent, who now represents them both. Ten years after the master class, their new books were released within weeks of one another, and Jemimah even traveled back to Singapore to help Tash launch his novel in the place where they met.

In the first half of the episode, we discuss why Jemimah stood out to Tash in class, how to make a writing life (especially coming from outside the U.S.), being “genre-agnostic,” revising book-length projects, and what to look for in a literary agent.

In the second half of the episode, Jemimah and Tash share an excerpt from The Original Daughter and The South, and we zoom in on the very themes from Tash’s master class ten years ago: time and place. We focus especially on the factors that influence how we experience time – things like age and maturity level, as well as culture, labor, economics, and the pressure to produce or succeed – and also how we experience time as readers through craft elements like verb tense and perspective, or what Jemimah calls the narrator’s “narrative perch” with respect to past or present events.

 

Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com

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Tash Aw is the author of five novels and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. As an essayist and critic, he has contributed to the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York Times and the Guardian, among many other publications. He is currently a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin.

Jemimah Wei is the author of The Original Daughter. Born and raised in Singapore, she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemmingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, Joyland, amongst others. For close to a decade, Jemimah was a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon.

More Jemimah: https://jemmawei.com/

More Tash: https://www.instagram.com/tash.aw/?hl=en

Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.

 

If you think you know Handel’s Semele and its show-stopping aria “Myself I shall adore”, Oliver Mears has other ideas. Far from showing us an explosion of self-indulgent vanity, Mears zeroes in on the cruelty of Juno’s deceit, setting up her husband’s lover to be burnt to a crisp: we feel sympathy for Semele’s vanity, not contempt. And who knew that Pretty Yende sings Handel as if she has been doing so since the cradle? She ran through Handelian semiquavers as if this was the most natural thing in the world, her accents judged with immaculate taste and a voice that sweetened out as it hit the highest fastest notes that might normally go brittle. Mears’ interpretation of the role is an ingénue servant trapped in the hatreds of the rich and powerful and Yende acts it to perfection, injecting Semele’s mood changes into both voice and body language, creating a completely sympathetic character.

Semele may be packed with glamorous melodies, but Mears’ vision of the piece is daringly bleak. It ends well for no-one: Semele dead, her ex-fiancé Athamas and sister Ino trapped in a loveless marriage, Jupiter and Juno doomed to repeat the cycle of infidelity, jealousy and revenge. The only consolation is that the human chorus can drown its sorrows in the product of her womb, the wine god Bacchus.

Yende may have leapt in one bound to the top of the tree of Handelian singing, but the rest of the cast was not far behind both in vocal chops and in acting. In the opera’s other big showstopper, Jupiter’s “Where’er you walk”, Ben Bliss transported us to a place of utter beauty in the most gorgeous of tenors. In Juno’s accompagnato “Awake, Saturnia, from Thy Lethargy”, when Alice Coote decreed “let her fall, rolling down the depths of night”, never has a female voice plumbed the cavernous depths so viciously, and her ensuing rage aria was explosive. As Athamas, Carlo Vistoli was something of a nebbish in Act 1, but when we got to his forced marriage in Act 3, he delivered a bravura piece of melisma singing suffused with sarcasm, spitting the words “Since you so kind do prove” into the faces of Jupiter and Juno, who had destroyed his real beloved.

Brindley Sherratt was similarly anonymous as Cadmus in Act 1, but when he took the role of the Somnus in Act 2, his portrayal of the sleep god as a lecherous dirty old man was vocally rich, completely solid and perfectly consonant with the story. Niamh O’Sullivan was an attractive Ino and even a minor part like Juno’s sidekick Iris came through with style, Marianna Hovanisyan painting a terrifying picture of the dragons guarding Jupiter’s palace in “With adamant the gates are barr’d”. Last but not least, the Royal Opera Chorus were fine ambassadors for Handel and his use of them in classical Greek-Chorus style to provide human comment on divine events.

The evening did have its disappointments, most notably the setting, which is downbeat to the point where it is horribly lacking in visual appeal. Designer Annemarie Woods sets the Olympians’ palace as the kind of conference hotel that I’ve spend a lot of my life trying to avoid: blocky, anonymous and dingily lit. The regal Cadmus is demoted to a bell captain in a cheap suit; the greatest pleasures that Jupiter can summon up for Semele’s delectation seem to be the three Cs of cigarettes, champagne and chocolates. While I’m sure that Mears and Woods are trying to make a point about how ultimately empty is the hedonism provided by such gods, it makes for 90 minutes of fairly dismal viewing in Acts 1 and 2. These also dragged because, despite conductor Christian Curnyn’s best efforts, the Royal Opera Orchestra are not a period band and there was a certain weightiness to the sound which wasn’t masked by the brilliance of the singing.

But all this is forgotten from when the curtain goes up on Act 3 and the drama immediately ratchets up. The setting of Somnus’ lair is gloriously decrepit; the cruel deception of Semele by Jupiter and Juno in turn is vividly portrayed, as is Semele’s own attempts to raise her self-confidence to become something she is not, with the attendant downfall. The bitterness of Mears’ version of the ending may be far from Handel’s intentions, but it is so intelligently staged and acted as to make this opera engaging and thought-provoking, far beyond its music’s undoubted beauties. 

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Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh is currently on a trip to Canada from Wednesday 25th June to Wednesday 2nd July 2025.

According to palace, the Duke of Edinburgh, as Colonel-in-Chief of The Prince Edward Island Regiment, visited Prince Edward Island to attend celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the Regiment, including a Freedom of the City parade.

Edward has been Colonel-in-Chief since 2005.

On the island, the Duke also visited the Abegweit First Nation, took part in an education forum with representatives of the four Atlantic provinces, and met youth organisations.

While in Toronto, he visited the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment of which he is Colonel-in-Chief, as well as the naval reserve unit HMCS York, and CFB Trenton air base.

Prince Edward met community leaders and emerging youth leaders and took part in engagements recognising the service of public sector organisations, including the Toronto Police Service’s Marine Unit and Emergency Task Force.

The Duke also attended a service at Christ Church, His Majesty’s Chapel Royal of the Mohawk, the first Protestant Church in Upper Canada and the oldest surviving church in Ontario.

On Tuesday 1st July, the Duke of Edinburgh will attend the Canada Day celebrations in Ottawa, and, as Honorary Deputy Commissioner, His Royal Highness will visit the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

He will also celebrate the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award, which equips young people in Canada to reach their full potential. The Canada Award has been operating since 1963.

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‘Hearty vibes’

A reality TV star who was imprisoned for defrauding banks of tens of millions of dollars before being pardoned in May by Donald Trump says there is nothing for him to be sorry about.

“I don’t have an apology to give you or anyone else over the money that I’ve made,” Todd Chrisley said in an interview with ABC News that was posted online Monday.

Speaking to the network alongside his wife, Julie, who was also imprisoned and then pardoned by the president, Chrisley’s comments were some of his most extensive comments yet about his and his spouse’s abbreviated experiences behind bars.

He joked that his first post-pardon shower back home was as exciting as his “first sexual encounter”. And, as his family begins planning to return to television with a new reality show on Lifetime, he said “it doesn’t matter what someone else’s opinion” of him is.

“No one’s opinion of me has ever caused me to question who I am at the core,” the former co-star of Chrisley Knows Best said to ABC News. “So I don’t worry about someone else’s opinion.”

Chrisley Knows Best aired on USA Network from 2014 to 2023, depicting Todd as a wealthy real estate developer and entrepreneur who was raising a family with Julie in their suburban Atlanta mansion.

But in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, the federal government charged the Chrisleys with tax evasion and bank fraud. Jurors in 2022 convicted the couple of defrauding banks of at least $30m, leaving Todd to be sentenced to 12 years in prison and Julie to seven years.

The couple’s daughter Savannah Chrisley was a vocal Trump advocate as he successfully ran for a second presidency in November 2024. Trump then pardoned Todd and Julie on 27 May, a little more than four months after he was sworn back into the Oval Office.

Trump personally called Savannah to inform her of her parents’ pardons, according to a White House video.

The Chrisleys’ pardons freed them from prison after serving less than three years. Their pardons came amid a series of clemencies that Trump gave to supporters in what evidently was a broader rebuke against a justice system that had convicted him of criminally falsifying business records months before he retook the White House.

Some particularly criticized the Chrisleys’ pardons because an appeals court had upheld their jury convictions.

Nonetheless, as ABC News noted, Todd argued that the makeup of the couple’s jury was questionable and the president was right to pardon him and Julie.

Julie recounted to the network that she had made some everlasting friendships while incarcerated. “I have met some amazing women … that I will be friends with till the day that I die,” she told ABC.

Yet, unsurprisingly, Todd said he and his wife were relieved to be out of prison early as they weigh whether to move to South Carolina and film themselves converting a mansion into a hotel.

“You don’t realize how much your freedom means to you until you don’t have it,” he remarked.