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In 1993, while on tour in Mexico with a Cuban ballet troupe, Cubans Ariel Serrano and his wife Wilmian Hernandez bought one-way tickets and boarded a plane to Miami... Nearly 32 years since that pivotal day—Serrano and Hernandez will again board a plane, their dreams having expanded infinitely beyond what they could ever have imagined. This time the destination is London, where they will sit in the plush scarlet seats at The Royal Opera House and watch their son Francisco, 28, a soloist with The Royal Ballet, perform his first lead role The school they initially established to train their...

The Venezuelan poster-boy conductor is due to become artistic and music director of the New York Philharmonic in eight months’ time. The position has the highest profile of any US orchestral position. Dudamel, who turns 45 this month, has held close links with successive governments in Caracas. Today, United States forces swooped to capture the corrupt Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, with whom Dudamel has had an on-off and latterly on again relationship. Dudamel led European tours of the regime’s showcase El Sistema orchestra in 2025. He has maintained that his loyalty is to the Sistema organisation and not to its...

I did an instrumental composition in the vein of Santana. Some interesting changes but still with a Latin vide. If you like the piece, please like and subscribe.

A powerful geomagnetic storm may light up skies across parts of the United States on New Year’s Eve, as a surge in solar activity raises the odds of seeing the aurora borealis farther south than usual. According to a forecast by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, residents in up to ten U.S. states may witness this rare atmospheric event, just in time to ring in the new year. The forecast follows a burst of activity from a large sunspot, sending energy toward Earth and setting the stage for a potentially spectacular natural display. States Most Likely to Witness the...

A veteran jazz ensemble and a New York dance company have canceled events at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, intensifying the fallout at one of the nation’s pre-eminent arts centers after it was renamed to include President Trump. The center had previously promoted two New Year’s Eve performances by the Cookers as an “all-star jazz septet that will ignite the Terrace Theater stage with fire and soul.” But those performances, like an annual Christmas Eve jazz concert hosted by Chuck Redd, are now canceled. The Cookers did not give a reason for the decision in a...

Ace Frehley, 74 – Lead guitarist band Kiss Bernie Kerik, 69 – New York City 9/11 police chief Bill Moyers, 91 – Broadcaster Boris Spassky, 88 – Russian chess champion Charles Rangel, 94 – U.S. politician Chuck Mangione, 84 – U.S. flugelhorn player known for hit “Feels So Good” Connie Francis, 87 – U.S. singer who topped the charts in the 1950s and 1960s David Johansen, 75 – Lead singer of band The New York Dolls Diane Ladd, 89 – U.S. actor Garth Hudson, 87 – Keyboardist of rock group The Band Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield, 63 – Bassist of band...

This is a list of those notable entertainment figures who passed away in 2025. They are in order of date of death (and alphabetically within each date), except for the first entry, which will be the most globally high-profile death to date. To see the most recent additions first, select "Date Added" in the Sort by drop-down box; to view the list in reverse chronological order, toggle the "Ascending/Descending order" button next to the drop-down box. Among the most notable showbiz vets we lost this year are: Georgio Armani, fashion designer Brigitte Bardot, actress/singer Claudia Cardinale, actress Richard Chamberlain, actor...

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, thieves broke into a parish church in the Sevillian town of Paradas, mistakenly stealing a replica of a painting by El Greco after believing it to be the original work. The incident occurred at the Church of San Eutropio, where both the authentic artwork and a publicly displayed copy are housed. The stolen piece was a replica of La Magdalena Penitente, a painting attributed to the 16th-century artist Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco. The original painting remains inside the church and was not removed, as it is kept behind protective iron bars...

The president of the Kennedy Center sharply criticized a musician Friday for canceling a Christmas Eve performance at the venue after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the building. Richard Grenell, the center’s president, accused musician Chuck Redd of political intolerance in a letter responding to the sudden withdrawal, which Grenell said came just days before the scheduled concert. The letter, shared with The Associated Press, said the cancellation was explicitly tied to the recent renaming of the facility, which Grenell described as honoring Trump’s efforts to preserve the arts institution.

Adam the Woo is gone, and the silence in his wake reveals more about modern America than 1,000 trending hashtags ever could. On December 22, David Adam Williams, known to untold millions simply as Adam the Woo, was found unresponsive in his home just outside Walt Disney World. He loved this theme park beyond words and videoed it countless times, eagerly sharing his adventures with viewers across the globe. A friend conducting a welfare check sent for help after seeing Adam’s motionless body through a window. Authorities pronounced him dead at the age of 51. He apparently died in his...

On Nov.13 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a big surprise while enjoying their lunch. Over 100 participants in this awesome Christmas Flash Mob. This is a must see!

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the release of "Good Will to Men", directed by none other than William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who went on to create The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and a lot of other classic cartoons."Good Will to Men" is basically a remake of the much darker (and hard to find) 1939 short "Peace on Earth".Thankfully, we are no longer under such dire threat of nuclear annihilation as audiences were in the Fifties. But I thought this was worth sharing all the same. Its themes are more timely than ever before."Love thy neighbor." Click here to...

From the 1950s gangs of North London to the ruins of the Roman Empire, from the rise of the Berlin Wall to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, from the horrors of the Vietnam War to those of Biafra, Beirut, Iraq and elsewhere, as well as the beautiful bleakness of the Somerset countryside

Archimedes, one of ancient Greece’s most famous and influential physicists and engineers, left a legacy of writings that had been thought to be lost to time. Much of his work only survived through copies and translations by scribes. One of the most famous fragments of Archimedes’ writings was the Palimpsest, a manuscript which by the 12th century a monk had overwritten and repurposed as a book of prayers. To discover the writings of Archimedes in the manuscript, scientists recently used the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to reveal the iron content of the ink written under the monk’s prayers. The method...

For more than seven decades, the family behind electronics giant Samsung amassed one of Asia’s largest private art collections....The Lee Kun-hee collection, which was started by its namesake’s father, Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, is unprecedented in its scope and scale. Almost all the 23,000 donated items went to the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art...."Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” is showing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC through February 1, 2026.

@DrClownPhD wrote "In 2–3 years, there will be no way to tell what’s real and what’s not… and I have no idea how humanity will deal with this enormous problem."

The Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees voted to rename the performing arts institution the Trump-Kennedy Center, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was established by Congress as the national center for performing arts and a living memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy and opened its doors in 1971. It recognizes achievements in music, theater and dance each year with its honors ceremony.

In a reflection of Hollywood’s ongoing decline, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the Academy Awards will depart from network TV and move to streaming on YouTube beginning in 2029. The ceremony will continue on ABC through 2028, the 100th Anniversary of the Oscars. Ratings for the show have been on a steady downward decline for years for reasons that seem obvious to everyone except people in Hollywood. America stopped paying attention because people don’t want to be lectured about politics from rich liberals who live in a bubble. Ratings for the once ‘must-watch tv’ have continued...

The Italian Renaissance gave birth to ballet, but Russians dominated the art to such a degree no one questioned their supremacy. The Bolshoi, the world’s reigning company, pirouetted onto U.S. stages in 1959 and 1962. The State Department-sponsored American Ballet Theatre (ABT) went east in 1960 followed two years later by the New York City Ballet (NYCB), led by its Russian émigré choreographer George Balanchine. Adding a thermonuclear layer of stress, the Cuban Missile Crisis ignited in October 1962 when the Bolshoi and the NYCB were in each other’s countries. Upstart Americans left home unproven underdogs…The New York Times feared...

The Dec. 19 flyby of Comet 3I/ATLAS gives astronomers a rare chance to study only the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system. VIDEO AT LINK............... Astronomers and skywatchers are hoping to spot interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS on Dec. 19 when it makes its closest — but safely distant — flyby of Earth. The comet has drawn global attention as only the third confirmed interstellar object observed passing through our solar system. According to NASA, Comet 3I/ATLAS will not pose any threat to Earth during its pass. The object is expected to remain about 170 million miles from...