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The much-debated potential two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is being proposed to cover up the institution’s failings since US president Donald Trump installed loyalists to the board and became its chair, says Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty in a fiery 51-page Friday filing in US District Court for Washington, D.C. Beatty is an ex-officio member of the board of trustees. Trump has insisted the closure is necessary and dictated a date for it, the filing points out, without any proper board oversight. The strongly worded filing says the administration has responded “grudgingly—to put it generously” to requests for information; criticizes a defense by Trump as being based on “a fake one-year review that never happened”; cites a “sham process to lend a false patina of legitimacy”; and, in a piquant choice of words given Trump’s admiration of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, calls Trump’s decision to close the center a “ukase,” a term re...

Georgia Daals on the burst for Petone against Poneke in their WRFU women’s 7s tournament on Saturday. Photo: Andy McArthur. The first of five scheduled Saturdays of sevens was held at Rugby League Park on Saturday with the first of the two WRFU women’s tournaments. The Petone Ponies have the upper hand heading into this...

John Pulu | Presenter/ Reporter/Director From West Auckland to Māngere, political hopefuls hit the campaign trail to tackle the cost of living, healthcare, and community representation . The Hon. Alfred Ngaro is no stranger to New Zealand politics. The former National MP and Minister for Pacific Peoples is now standing in Glendene, West Auckland, on a different ticket. “The vaka I’m on at the moment is the New Zealand First political party and it holds my values and I believe a lot of our Christian sort of social conservative values as well.” Ngaro was the first Cook Islander elected to Parliament in 2011. After nine years as a National Party MP, he left and re-emerged with a new party, ‘NewZeal’, in the last election. “It’s always been a calling, not a career,” he says.  “I feel that I was always called to this in the...

We have blast off for the Wellington club rugby sevens season A scheduled four-week Wellington club rugby sevens series starts tomorrow with the first of two scheduled women’s tournaments. The plan  for the WRFU is to run two weeks of women’s and then two weeks of men’s club sevens over the next five weekends –...

Two Republican members of the House of Representatives want to know more about how the Smithsonian Institution evaluates proposed exhibits after a museum display tied US-made munitions to the destruction of civilian’s homes in conflict zones. “The Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency is concerned that the Smithsonian Institution (Smithsonian) does not properly review proposed exhibits in its museums,” says a letter to outgoing Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch III, penned by subcommittee chairman Tim Burchett of Tennessee along with Georgia’s Brian Jack. The move comes in the wake of a July hearing at which Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) was grilled by lawmakers, including Burchett, who demanded to know, “Dr. Hartig, are you America first? Do you love America?” Burchett and Jack say that at that hearing, members requested information on the Smithsonian’s content review process but...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art became an unwitting new home for a work by the Los Angeles–based artist David (Sabastian) Miklatski, who snuck a drawing onto one of the institution’s walls and documented its time there for all the world to see. As reported by Hyperallergic , “In a viral Instagram reel, multi-hyphenate artist David (Sabastian) Miklatski detailed the steps of creating and surreptitiously installing a drawing on one of The Met’s gallery walls last Sunday, October 25. The work in question, The MET 2027 , is an oil pastel painting depicting a Met Gala attendee ascending the staircase flanked by shrubs and photojournalists as police in riot gear beat down protestors in a fiery scene in the foreground.” Miklatski’s Instagram reel , set to the soundtrack of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” (aka “Teenage Wasteland”), shows his work at the Met interspersed with starry images from the Met Gala—which the artist describes as “an event where billionaires donat...

It has been a summer of change for Pace Gallery, and its 2024 accounts that were filed 10 months late with Companies House, the British government’s business register, reflect that. The group’s turnover totaled $67.69 million in 2024, a 35.5 percent drop from 2023, which cashed in $104.95 million. A pre-tax loss of $2,429 was recorded for 2024 compared to a $6.8 million profit for 2023. (The mega-gallery’s UK registered company, The Pace Gallery Limited, serves as the umbrella company for its operations in Europe and Asia, excluding Tokyo as well as the US.) “This reflected a continuation of the sector-wide contraction in global and UK art markets as well as a continued reluctance by some clients to buy which became most pronounced in 2024 and continued through 2025 and into 2026,” Pace Gallery said in the filing. “The market conditions led the directors to initiate cost saving measures across the group, but despite these measures, difficult market condit...