Boston’s mayor has written an angry letter to Rolling Stone magazine slamming it for putting marathon bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover, as some US stores refuse to stock the music rag.
Boston mayor lashes out at Rolling Stone
Category Archives: Political
Tales from the Back Benches
It is a Wednesday night and The Backbencher pub in central Wellington is packed. Unless you have booked a table, it is standing room only and there are some familiar faces in the crowd – Justice Minister Judith Collins shares space with people holding signs calling for the legalisation of cannabis and a fellow who has made a Peter Dunne puppet.
Amanda Palmer’s naked hostility towards tabloid
Like our own radio shouters, the almost permanently outraged UK tabloid the Daily Mail is used to bullying its victims with mock shock, righteous abuse or just plain hyperbole. All in the name of middle England.
TV’s way of dealing with off-screen deaths
As the death of Glee star Cory Monteith highlights, the pain for colleagues and friends is very real.
The X Factor’s double whammy
Last night’s The X Factor semi finale was a show full of double whammys.
Study: TV’s female characters are sexual targets
Teenage female characters are sexual fodder for broadcast network TV series, especially comedies, according to a conservative US advocacy group’s new study. An examination of 238 sitcoms and dramas airing in the United States during four weeks in 2011 and 2012 found a third of the episodes included content that “rose to the level of sexual exploitation” of females, according to the Parents Television Council report
Lopez sings for Turkmen dictator
Jennifer Lopez sang Happy Birthday to the leader of Turkmenistan during a show, but her representative said she wouldn’t have performed there at all if she had known there were human rights issues in the country. The singer and actress performed in the former Soviet bloc country on Saturday night
Waxed off: Final insult to Julia
OPINION: Where do you draw the line When does a publicity stunt in the name of entertainment cross over into a tacky, potentially offensive, classless act of ticket sales over tact Well for me, that line lies somewhere a long way before this line: a photo of an “unemployment queue” outside a job centre featuring Australia’s most recent former prime minister apparently waiting her turn, resume in hand, to sign up.
World War Z’s Israeli wall sparks questions
Brad Pitt’s World War Z imagines a world overrun by a zombie pandemic, leading to an unlikely new global power structure. Two of the few countries that have kept the zombies at bay are Israel, which shelters Israelis and Palestinians behind a wall, and North Korea, which has removed the teeth of its citizens to prevent zombie biting
The comeback: Susan Wood on returning to TVNZ
When Susan Wood left television in 2006 she was not in a good place. She had just hada large part of her thyroid removed, she’d had a very public, bitter dispute with Television New Zealand executives about her salary as host of Close Up, and she wasn’t sure she could handle the chaotic life of a newsroom much longer.