Entertainment

For a musician used to receiving personal insults from the president and anonymous death threats with the release of every new single, Emmerson Bockarie laughs a lot. The Sierra Leonean popstar, a thorn in the side of successive governments over his 15-year career, chuckles as he recalls the countless times politicians have sought to dampen […]

American designer and celebrity DJ Virgil Abloh is to take over menswear at Louis Vuitton, the brand said Monday, in a dramatic shake-up at the top of men’s fashion. The appointment of rap star Kanye West’s longtime friend and creative director to the world’s biggest luxury label shows the massive impact street style is now […]

Once proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” Hedy Lamarr is remembered as the silver screen siren who scandalized show business in a 1930s nude scene. The raven-haired actress, who died at the turn of the millennium at age 86, wrote in her memoirs that “any girl can be glamorous: all you have to […]

Swiss singer Lys Assia, the first-ever winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, has died aged 94, the competition’s organisers said. Assia, who won the first edition of the contest in 1956 in Lugano, Switzerland, with the song “Refrain”, “passed away on March 24 at Zurich’s Zollikerberg Hospital, having recently turned 94,” Eurovision said in a […]

Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries said Friday it was integrating its music app with sector leader Saavn in a $1 billion deal that shows the high hopes for streaming in the billion-plus market. Reliance, a company with holdings from oil to telecoms run by India’s richest person Mukesh Ambani, said it would pump $100 million into […]

Hip-hop magnate Russell Simmons was slapped Friday with a $10-million rape lawsuit filed by a woman in Los Angeles, the latest in a string of accusations against him ranging from harassment to rape. The unidentified woman said in the complaint filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court that the mogul raped her in a […]

Japan’s First Lady Akie Abe is a freewheeling, flamenco-dancing socialite who once described herself as the “opposition” to husband Shinzo and is now embroiled in a scandal that threatens his career. The 55-year-old scion of a major confectionery firm has been thrust into the spotlight amid a favouritism and cover-up affair that has battered the […]

Ever since Joshua Leonard helped reinvent indie film-making as a star of found-footage pioneer “The Blair Witch Project,” he has been something of a go-to guy for groundbreaking, no-budget cinema. Two decades on he’s at it again, in an acclaimed but deeply unsettling role as a stalker in “Unsane” — filmed entirely on an iPhone […]