Puerto Rican rapper to follow Grammy victory and anti-ICE speech with show on most-watched US TV event of the year
Just a week after receiving the Grammy award for Album of the Year, the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny will take on the US’s most watched concert of the year when he performs at the Super Bowl this Sunday.
The artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio took home the music academy’s top honor for 2025’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a politically minded record infused with Puerto Rican music and culture. The album became the first Spanish-language work to take home the prize, beating out competition from Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.
Continue reading...Macmillan announces new instalment of popular Julia Donaldson tale featuring illustrations by Axel Scheffler
The Gruffalo family is to expand after the publisher of the popular children’s stories announced a long-awaited third book about the beloved monster.
The new tale, Gruffalo Granny, will be published on 10 September, Macmillan announced.
Continue reading...Cubans, once fast-tracked to US residency, now find themselves targets of Trump’s immigration crackdown
When Rosaly Estévez “self-deported” from Miami to Havana last November, US immigration officers bid farewell by removing her ankle monitor. The 32-year-old had been told she was about to be detained, so she left with her three-year-old son, Dylan, a US citizen.
Heidy Sánchez, 43, wasn’t given a choice. She was forcibly removed from Florida last April but, worrying about Cuba’s failing healthcare system, she left her two-year-old daughter, Kaylin, behind with her American husband, Carlos.
Continue reading...Anthony Joshua and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie went through terrible experiences; now a young singer has died. The events are all linked
The death from a snakebite of singer Ifunanya Nwangene in an Abuja hospital last Saturday, allegedly after a frantic and failed search for antivenom, sent a familiar shudder through Nigeria. It was a profoundly personal tragedy, yet it felt grimly systemic. Within days, it became part of a devastating triad of events framing a national crisis. A few weeks before, the country had grappled with the death of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s young son in a premium private hospital in Lagos, amid allegations of negligence. Just before that, there were the images of boxer Anthony Joshua, after a serious car crash near Lagos, being helped by bystanders with no ambulance or emergency service in sight.
A cobra in an upmarket apartment, a fatal error in a high-end facility, a wrecked car on the roadside. These seem like disconnected misfortunes: in truth, they are interconnected. They represent a diagnostic map of a health system in collapse, a system where survival is determined by a lethal lottery of geography, wealth, and sheer chance.
Continue reading...The author on taking solace in Joan Didion, discovering Donna Tartt and being cheered up by David Sedaris
My earliest reading memory
The first books I became obsessed with were Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories Malory Towers and St Clare’s. When I was eight, I’d hide them under my pillow and read by the hallway light when I was supposed to be asleep.
My favourite book growing up
Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I felt woefully misunderstood by the world and longed to be adopted by a very pretty teacher with only cardboard for furniture. I spent a lot of time trying to make a pen move by concentration alone. Sometimes I still try.
Their ‘pro family’ rhetoric is a cynical and hollow sham
Of the 3,800 children and infants taken into immigration custody between January and October of 2025, a majority – 2,600 – were detained by ICE officers. That means that the children, as young as one or two years old, were not arrested at the border or legal ports of entry, where asylum seekers frequently present themselves to border officers, but from inside the country.
That means that those children were not new arrivals seeking help; they were kids going about their daily lives in the US, often with legal status. They were children like Liam Ramos, aged five, who was snatched from his driveway after school by immigration agents while wearing a blue bunny hat to keep him warm in the Minnesota cold. They are children like one student, a 17-year-old from Liam’s school district in Minnesota, who was taken from their car, or the other child, a 10-year-old girl in the fourth grade, who was taken alongside her mother; or the two other boys, brothers in the second and fifth grades, who were delivered by school officials to an ICE detention center after their mother was arrested and taken there. She had called the school to ask them to bring her boys to her in the prison; there was no one else to take care of them.
Continue reading...⚽ All the latest news heading into the weekend’s action
⚽ Premier League: 10 things to look out for | Mail John
Slot has praised Florian Wirtz, who has been in great form of late:
“I think it’s all, first and foremost, always credit to the player because he has to do the work not only on the pitch, also in the gym. And then as a manager, even if he is maybe physically struggling a little bit in the start, you need to keep on playing him because that’s the only way players can improve.
Continue reading...• Milano Cortina Games to be opened on Friday evening
• Schedule | Results | Medal table | Briefing | Get in touch
Lindsey Vonn inspected the Olympic downhill course with other racers early this morning as she prepared to take part in the opening training session despite tearing the ACL in her left knee a week ago.
The 41-year-old Vonn is planning to compete at the Milan Cortina Games with a large brace covering her injured knee.
Continue reading...Deputy director of Russia’s military intelligence agency shot several times in the stairwell of his apartment
A top Russian military official has been taken to hospital after being shot in Moscow, state media reported.
Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev was shot several times on the stairwell of his apartment on Friday by an unknown gunman in the north-west of the city and remains in critical condition, according to early reports.
Continue reading...Elke week luncht NRC mee bij een bedrijf. Deze week: Triodos Bank in Driebergen.
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Het is 'code gitzwart'. Dat zeggen de Gelderse strafrechter Frank Hovens en zijn Rotterdamse collega Jos van Mulbregt tegen De Gelderlander over het tbs-stelsel in Nederland. Dat is compleet vastgelopen. De politiek is nu aan zet, stellen zij. "Misschien moeten rechters minder snel tbs opleggen."
Vooral bij iets minder ernstige misdrijven die door daders met een stoornis zijn gepleegd, zouden rechters extra goed moeten nadenken of er betere alternatieven zijn dan tbs.
Dan gaat het dus niet om moord, doodslag of verkrachting. Wel om bijvoorbeeld bedreigingen of stalking. Ook dat zijn misdrijven waarvoor tbs gegeven kán worden.
Hovens en Van Mulbregt maken zich als twee vooraanstaande tbs-rechters ernstig zorgen over het vastlopen van de tbs. Het aantal tbs'ers stijgt alsmaar, maar de klinieken zitten overvol.
Bron: De Gelderlander
PARIJS (ANP/AFP/RTR) - De Franse oud-minister van Cultuur, Jack Lang, moet zondag uitleg komen geven bij het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken over zijn banden met zedendelinquent Jeffrey Epstein. Dat meldt minister Jean-Noël Barrot. Lang is op het moment directeur van de Parijse cultuurinstelling Institut du monde arabe.
Tegen BFMTV zei Lang woensdag dat Epstein geen vriend van hem was, maar dat hij hem waardeerde vanwege zijn "passie voor kunst, cultuur en cinema". Hij was naar eigen zeggen niet op de hoogte van de misstanden die Epstein had begaan, toen hij hem leerde kennen in 2012. Epstein werd in 2008 veroordeeld voor misbruik, en was in afwachting van zijn proces voor het grootschalig faciliteren van misbruik toen hij in 2019 overleed in zijn cel.
Uit onlangs door de VS vrijgegeven documenten rond Epstein zou blijken dat Langs banden met de Amerikaanse investeerder nauwer waren dan hij beweerde. Zo zou hij Epstein in een e-mail hebben bedankt voor de "fantastische dag".
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Sophie Hermans (VVD), die minister van Volksgezondheid wordt in het komende minderheidskabinet, denkt dat haar nieuwe post "grote en ingewikkelde opgaven" zal hebben. Hermans moet de miljardenbezuiniging in de zorg zien door te voeren, onder meer door het eigen risico te verhogen. Daarvoor is nog geen steun in de Tweede Kamer.
Hermans zei trots te zijn op de kwaliteit van de Nederlandse zorg, en denkt dat het nodig is er minder geld aan uit te geven om die kwaliteit te behouden. Het kabinet wil onder meer 5 miljard euro ophalen door het eigen risico niet te halveren en dat later te verhogen. Ook wordt geld bespaard door minder snel medicijnen toe te laten tot het basispakket en vervolgopleidingen voor medisch specialisten te verkorten. "Je kan daarvoor terugdeinzen in de politiek, maar dat doe ik niet."
Hermans is nu nog demissionair vicepremier en minister van Klimaat en Groene Groei.
BERLIJN (ANP/DPA) - Op de internationale luchthaven in Berlijn kunnen vrijdagochtend nog steeds geen vliegtuigen landen of opstijgen vanwege ijzel. Donderdagavond werd het vliegverkeer op de luchthaven in de Duitse hoofdstad al volledig stilgelegd en leidde het winterse weer tot veel annuleringen.
De hele nacht is geprobeerd de gladheid op de start- en landingsbanen te bestrijden, maar dit was zonder succes en ze zijn nog steeds zeer glad, zei een woordvoerster van het vliegveld tegen het Duitse persbureau dpa. Het is momenteel nog onduidelijk wanneer het vliegverkeer weer kan worden hervat.
Twee retourvluchten tussen Schiphol en Berlin Brandenburg Airport zijn vrijdagochtend geschrapt, is te zien op de website van Schiphol. Donderdag werden er ook al enkele vluchten tussen de twee luchthavens geannuleerd.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
