• Police seek suspects in deadly birthday party shooting
  • Lawmakers launch inquires into U.S. boat strike
  • Nov. 29, 2025, 10:07 PM EST / Updated Nov. 30, 2025,…
  • Mark Kelly says troops ‘can tell’ what orders…

Be that!

contact@bethat.ne.com

 

Be That ! Menu   ≡ ╳
  • Home
  • Travel
  • Culture
  • Lifestyle
  • Sport
  • Contact Us
  • Politics Politics
☰

Be that!

Why Prince Andrew Is Giving up His Royal Titles

admin - Latest News - October 18, 2025
admin
25 views 21 secs 0 Comments



NBC’s royal contributor Daisy McAndrew joins Saturday TODAY with analysis on why Prince Andrew has given up his royal titles and honors now, after years of criticism and outrage over his links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.



Source link

TAGS:
PREVIOUS
'No Kings' attendees in D.C. say why they're protesting
NEXT
Illinois Gov. Pritzker addresses ‘No Kings’ rally in Chicago: ‘Democracy requires your courage’
Related Post
October 23, 2025
Oct. 23, 2025, 3:51 PM EDTBy Rebecca KeeganAfter “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which counts Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara as executive producers, received a nearly 23-minute standing ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere in September, filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania took a slew of meetings with potential North American distributors.Executives praised the film, which follows the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s failed attempt to save Hind, a Palestinian child who was killed in Gaza in 2024 after being trapped in a car under Israeli fire. But not a single major studio or streamer made an offer on the movie, the official Oscar submission of the Tunisian Culture Ministry, Ben Hania said.“People never say, ‘I’m afraid to pick up a movie,’” Ben Hania said. “Maybe they are. I don’t know. They can’t openly talk about it, because it’s a shame to be afraid of talking about the killing of a child.”Four movies that tell stories about Palestinian people, set from 1936 to 2024, are competing for this year’s Academy Award for best international feature, just as a ceasefire takes hold in the region. The films, “All That’s Left of You,” “Palestine 36,” “The Sea,” and “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” are screening for awards voters this fall. Three of them are slated to run at the American Film Institute Festival in Los Angeles this week. Despite interest at the start of filming, and in some cases A-list backers, none of these films have secured a deal with a major studio or streamer, which is uncommon when a title receives buzz overseas. In past years, other foreign language films about major conflicts in history, such as Brazil’s “I’m Still Here” Germany’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and the United Kingdom’s “Zone of Interest” all found prominent distributors.As Hollywood has grown more outspoken in recent months about the situation in the Middle East, the challenges of convincing its distributors — the lifelines that can take movies from obscurity to national recognition — remain. The batch of movies arrives as the crisis in the Gaza Strip remains a flashpoint issue in the entertainment industry. More than 5,000 film and television professionals have signed on to a boycott of Israeli film institutions, while two studios, Paramount and Warner Bros.. have condemned the boycott. Just as some in Hollywood have worried about saying the wrong thing in a social media post or a red carpet interview, others have been vocal, like Javier Bardem, who wore a keffiyeh to the Emmy Awards in September and openly criticized the war in interviews on the red carpet, or Amy Schumer, who posted frequently on her Instagram account calling for the release of the Israeli hostages.A still from the film “Palestine 36.”Watermelon PicturesForeign films that get picked up for distribution often land with smaller independent companies, limiting the films to a few cities and small marketing budgets. International films have also long struggled with marketing to English-speaking audiences with non-English language films. Multiple distributors declined to comment on the record about why studios aren’t buying the movies about Palestinians, but studio sources said either that their slates were already full or that the movies don’t seem likely to draw large audiences to theaters.Without a major distributor, it can be hard for films from the region to demonstrate theatrical potential. But last year’s Oscar-winning “No Other Land,” a documentary about a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, shows both an appetite among American audiences for Palestinian stories and the complex issues these films face.When “No Other Land” failed to close a theatrical deal in North America, producers paid to release it in theaters themselves, collecting $2.5 million domestically, enough to make theirs the third highest grossing documentary of the year so far, after films featuring Taylor Swift and Led Zeppelin. The filmmakers then turned down an offer to stream on U.S. platforms from Mubi, citing the London company’s backing from Sequoia Capital, which also invests in an Israeli defense tech startup called Kela. (In August, Mubi’s CEO responded to backlash about Sequoia financing by saying that the profits Mubi generates “do not fund any other companies in Sequoia’s portfolio.”) For the filmmakers working in the region over the past two years, it’s been a long, arduous road to reach audiences, as the war impacted their physical productions and made potential distributors wary of facing political backlash for releasing their films. Seeking to fill what they see as a void in the marketplace, Palestinian-American brothers and producers Hamza and Badi Ali formed their own company, Watermelon Pictures, in April 2024. The duo also tapped model Alana Hadid as Watermelon’s creative director and unofficial brand ambassador.“Truthfully, we wish there was more competition,” Hamza Ali said. “It is almost like all of the pressure is on us to release these films and we feel obligated to do so. We hope that distributors of all sizes will start to engage.” The Chicago-based company is distributing “All That’s Left of You,” submitted by the Royal Film Commission–Jordan for Oscar consideration, and “Palestine 36,” submitted by the Palestinian Culture Ministry, both of which also received long ovations at film festivals and strong reviews from critics. Cherien Dabis as Hanan in “All That’s Left of You.”Watermelon PicturesOver a year since the company’s launch, the Ali brothers said that when they meet with executives at larger studios and streamers about buying films on Palestinian people, the buyers defer to higher ranking executives, citing the sensitivity of the subject matter, and effectively ending any conversation about a deal.For some directors, the barriers have come from their own governments. In Israel, filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollack won the country’s version of the Oscar for “The Sea,” the Ophir Award, only to have the Israeli government condemn the film and pull funding for the organization that granted the award. Each country chooses its own film to submit for Oscar consideration, and in Israel, the winner of best film at the Ophir Awards is automatically the country’s submission. “I wasn’t surprised,” said Carmeli-Pollack, whose film is about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who wants to join a school trip to the beach. “I’m not the first film that they attacked. In a way, they saved us a lot of explaining to the world that we do not represent this government.”In a statement issued on social media in September regarding the decision, Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar wrote in Hebrew that he believes the country’s taxpayers shouldn’t have to support a “ceremony that spits on the heroic Israeli soldiers. (The film features a soldier questioning a Palestinian boy and his father as they are trying to go to the beach).Muhammad Gawazi as Khaled in the film “The Sea.”MubiCarmeli-Pollack shot his movie in the West Bank in the summer of 2023, and he said he saw distributors’ enthusiasm for it evaporate after the Oct. 7 attacks. “The Sea” is now being released in the U.S. by Menemsha Films, a small Los Angeles-based company that distributes a variety of Jewish films.Stories shot in the Palestinian territories have always faced hurdles when it comes to securing locations, but the crisis in Gaza made physical production virtually impossible, directors who spoke to NBC News said.Cherien Dabis, the director, writer and star of “All That’s Left Of You,” was scheduled to start shooting her film in October 2023 in Jericho. Plans changed after the Oct. 7, Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which led Dabis to evacuate her cast and crew from the West Bank.“We were hearing fighter jets and cities were being sealed off, checkpoints were closing,” she said. “We thought maybe we’d come back to Palestine, things would blow over. We had no idea.”We need to make sure that we’re speaking to the masses.-Cherien Dabis, the director, writer and star of “All That’s Left Of You”Dabis, whose movie she said is backed by a mix of European and Arab financing, ended up shooting in Greece, Cyprus and Jordan, telling the fraught history of the region through three generations of one family who were expelled from Jaffa in 1948. “Palestine 36” director Annemarie Jacir was also scheduled to shoot her historical drama in October 2023 in the West Bank, with a cast that includes British actor Jeremy Irons and Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass. But after Oct. 7, “There was no more insurance,” Jacir said. “No agents were going to send any of their cast to Palestine to film.” Jacir shot most of her movie in Jordan but was eventually able to return, with a much smaller crew, to film some scenes in Bethlehem, Jaffa and Jerusalem. In order to help their movies find wider audiences, some are enlisting high-profile Hollywood advocates. Dabis recruited Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo, two of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken figures on Gaza, as executive producers. “Given what we’ve watched unfold in the last two years, we understand that we need to break out of any kind of echo chamber,” she said. “We need to make sure that we’re speaking to the masses.”On Dec. 16, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce a narrowed list of 15 movies in contention for the international Oscar, ahead of the awards telecast March 15. Rebecca KeeganRebecca Keegan is the senior Hollywood reporter for NBC News Digital, where she covers the entertainment industry.
September 21, 2025
Rhode Island sheriffs’ retirement account woes bring scrutiny to their state-run plan
October 27, 2025
Hurricane Hunters film inside Hurricane Melissa's eye
October 29, 2025
Oct. 29, 2025, 4:57 AM EDT / Updated Oct. 29, 2025, 8:53 AM EDTBy Andrew GreifIn 2022, after three minutes of spinning, flipping and skiing down a slopestyle course designed to resemble China’s Great Wall, Alex Hall raised his arms triumphantly while accepting the Olympic gold medal. Hall’s golden moment was met with mostly silence. Standing atop the podium of a Beijing Olympics that played out under China’s strict “zero-Covid” policy, he looked at empty grandstands. He spent his next day being drug tested, seeing a handful of Team USA friends and doing interviews with journalists for hours before flying home to Utah. “Not having the fans in 2022, I think, was definitely a bit of a bummer,” Hall said. When the Winter Olympics open in 100 days with an opening ceremony inside Milan’s famed San Siro soccer stadium, a much different scene will await competitors taking part in the first truly open Winter Games since 2018. As befitting a complex competition featuring 16 different sports and innumerable geopolitical influences, the 2026 Olympics are being carefully watched by athletes, organizers and Olympics observers for a number of reasons. They are the first games since the International Olympic Committee elected its first woman as president, Kirsty Coventry. This is also an extraordinarily far-flung Olympics, with venues spread out between urban Milan and three mountain “clusters,” some a five-hour drive away — Cortina d’Ampezzo, Livigno and Val di Fiemme. And Milan and the surrounding Lombardy region returns to the global spotlight after Covid wracked northern Italy nearly six years ago. Yet in the lead-up to the games, which begin Feb. 4, athletes have expressed excitement that not only are the Olympics returning, but fans are, too — and with them, a sense of competitive normalcy. In one sign of demand from the outside world to attend the first Winter Olympics in Europe since 2006, more than 120,000 people have applied to fill 18,000 volunteer positions, according to organizers.Hilary Knight, the four-time Olympic medalist for the U.S. hockey team who is preparing for her fifth Olympics, said competing in Beijing felt akin to playing in a television studio.“It didn’t feel like the Olympics because we were missing those moments or those touch points with those we hold so dearly that have cheered us on our entire careers and have sacrificed so much to get us to that one, key moment,” Knight said. “Everyone’s just really looking forward to that experience, together. … It’s a shared experience, right? Like you win a medal, you want to share it with as many people as possible.”The Olympics have already faced, and passed, one post-Covid test, when athletes competing at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris often remarked at the size and sound of crowds that packed venues across the city. Organizers from the Milan-Cortina bid were taking notes from inside the closing ceremony, readying for a turn they have been waiting for since 2019, when the IOC selected their bid over a joint bid by Stockholm-Åre in Sweden.That Milan wanted the Olympics, despite the challenges of cost, logistics and infrastructure that have driven many other potential host cities away, did not surprise John Foot, a professor of modern Italian history at Bristol University in the U.K., whose research has included Italian sports. Cortina hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics, and elite skiers have long favored competing in the city. American skier Lindsey Vonn said its inclusion as a venue was partly responsible for bringing her out of retirement to try to make a fifth Olympics.”There’s something special about Cortina that always pulls me back,” Vonn said.Foot said it was likely that organizers in the city of more than a million — which sits in a wide, flat plane — had seen how hosting the 2006 Winter Olympics had helped spur Turin from an industrial to a post-industrial period of growth, in part thanks to a boost in tourism. Milan has a reputation as the economic engine of Italy because of its deep ties to fashion, industry and business, and for hosting six games during soccer’s 1990 World Cup, but it’s not known as being a cold-weather city, Foot said. He could not recall whether Milan had an ice rink during his 20 years living there.“It always has been a crossroads city because it’s very well positioned for Europe,” Foot said. The last time northern Italy attracted such global prominence was in 2020, for far different reasons. More than two weeks after the country’s first Covid-related death in late February, in Lombardy, the region that includes Milan, all sporting events in the country were put on hold. In 2022, one research team estimated that the pandemic was responsible for more than 165,000 excess deaths in Italy. That number had risen to more than 188,000 by 2023.Milan was able to rebound more quickly economically than other major cities in Italy, Foot said. But the spotlight in February won’t be on Milan alone. Milan will host only ice hockey, speed skating, figure skating and short track, a fraction of the 116 medal events during the games. The rest will be spread out across a wide area requiring a five-hour drive between Livigno, just across the Swiss border, to Cortina. It takes approximately four hours to drive from Milan to Livigno, and an hour longer to go from Milan to Cortina. Even the venues that will open the games (San Siro) and close them (Verona) are a nearly two-hour drive apart. U.S. officials repeatedly have asked fans to be patient, and realistic, if thinking of traveling between venues.The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee is “doing their best to make it feel like just a normal Olympic experience, even if athletes are separated by a few hours or multiple hours, and we’re not necessarily able to have that same close-knit village experience with all different sports,” Knight said. “That was definitely a high-priority item when we were talking with them and different athlete reps, is to feel that Team USA is really important, and to feel that energy from other athletes competing, to feel connected.”Winter Games are often spread out because of the need for both mountain venues and cities big enough to host a large amount of visitors, but the sheer distance in Italy could pose security risks, said Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University and former member of the U.S. under-23 national soccer team who has written extensively about the Olympics. Nicole Deal, the chief of security for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said the “decentralized” geography has led the committee to work with the State Department to ensure there is enough security around U.S. athletes. Armin Zöggeler, who earned medals in luge while representing Italy in six consecutive Olympics from 1994 through 2014, and assisted in the Milan-Cortina bid, acknowledged that the distance was “definitely a logistical challenge.” But he called it “a small price to pay when you think about what it means for the future of these locations.” “The athletes are really excited to finally experience ‘normal’ Olympic Games again after what happened in 2022,” Zöggeler said. “Back then, it was sad to see so many restrictions and empty venues. Northern Italy has such a rich winter sports tradition, and I know all the athletes will feel that energy during the Games. For the Italian team, having the Olympics at home is one of the greatest opportunities you can get in your career. I still remember Torino 2006 very well and I hope the athletes in 2026 can feel something similar. The support from the Italian fans, the ‘Tifosi,’ is something truly special. “I’m excited for the world, but especially the athletes, to see that passion again.”If the upcoming Olympics feel like the first “normal” Winter Games since 2018, then some of the issues facing them also feel typical to Boykoff, who called concerns over overspending, gentrification and environmental impacts typical for Olympic host cities.In the spring, Milan organizers announced a budget of about $1.9 billion, more than $100 million more than previously estimated, though that total did not take into account the cost of building a new hockey arena in Milan or rebuilding a sliding center in Cortina that had been used in the 1956 games. Rebuilding the sliding track required felling around 800 trees, which drew protests from environmental groups, and also concern from competitors that it would not open in time. When tests of the sliding track began this fall, however, it drew strong reviews.What remains concerningly unresolved, however, is whether a new hockey arena in Milan will be ready to host a competition that will see NHL players take part for the first time since 2014. The chief executive of Milan’s local organizing committee, Andrea Varnier, said the “timeline is very tight,” according to The Associated Press.In July, prosecutors in Milan alleged that corruption was behind the city’s soaring real estate values, including the construction of an Olympic village. The mayor denied wrongdoing to the city’s council. A court dismissed the accusations in September. But others have apparently viewed the Olympics as a chance to exploit; two men were arrested this month on charges of trying to illegally obtain public works contract and control nightlife and drug dealing in Cortina, according to prosecutors in Venice.The Olympics could very well be a “17-day party” in Italy, Boykoff said. If it does, it will be a strong opening act for the tenure of Coventry, a former Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe who is only months into running the IOC.“There are real prickly issues and controversial issues around the exclusion of trans athletes, the handing of the Olympics to dictatorships with principles that absolutely don’t chime with the principles enshrined in the Olympic Charter, so I don’t envy her at all,” Boykoff said. “I think she’s walking into a very difficult situation, and Italy and the Milano-Cortina Olympics is her first chance to really put her own original stamp on the Olympic Games.”Hall, the freestyle skier, donned a sweatshirt bearing the Italian and U.S. flags Tuesday as he described his excitement in defending his gold medal in locale he knows well. Before he moved to Utah when he was 16, Hall, whose mother is Italian, grew up skiing the Alps. In 100 days, he expects to see a large number of aunts, uncles and cousins who live in Italy cheering him on in Livigno, up close. “She’s got a huge Italian fam,” Hall, now 27, said of his mother. “So they’re all pulling up.”Andrew GreifAndrew Greif is a sports reporter for NBC News Digital. 
Comments are closed.
Scroll To Top
  • Home
  • Travel
  • Culture
  • Lifestyle
  • Sport
  • Contact Us
  • Politics
© Copyright 2025 - Be That ! . All Rights Reserved