The war in Gaza means the European Broadcasting Union is risking its liberal reputation, but to ban Israel would be to undermine the organisation’s fundamental purpose

As they get ready to watch this year’s final on Saturday, many Eurovision fans will be feeling conflicted. Some will not watch at all. The reason is the participation of Israel. Isn’t Eurovision supposed to be about “ love, love, peace, peace ” (as the 2016 contest’s Swedish hosts so memorably portrayed it)? If so, they may ask, what’s the besieger of Gaza doing there?

Some people argue that the people who run Eurovision, members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), are simply spineless. Others point to the sponsorship of the event by Moroccanoil, which despite its name is Israeli. But a big international organisation is hardly dependent on a beauty products company.

Chris West is the author of Eurovision: A History of Modern Europe Through the World’s Greatest Song Contest, published by Melville House UK

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Abel Tesfaye is arguably the world’s biggest pop star – so why is he thinking of wrapping up the Weeknd? As he releases soul-baring film Hurry Up Tomorrow, he charts his path through drugs, heartbreak and abandonment

Walking out to perform in front of 80,000 people and finding that your voice has gone: it’s the type of stress dream you have the night before a big work presentation. But for Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, it happened for real at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2022. “I ran backstage to find my vocal coach: I can’t sing, it’s not coming out,” he says. “And what I found out later on is that I was having a panic attack. It wasn’t a physical injury. It was more up here” – he gestures to his head – “than it was here” – his throat.

The concert, which had to be called off and rescheduled, was the final night of a US stadium tour happening while Tesfaye was also wrapping up his painfully gestated – and eventually widely lampooned – TV series The Idol , which he starred in, co-wrote and co-produced. As production overran, he fitted in shoots around his tour; his own home was the main filming location. He began experiencing sleep paralysis.

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This space comedy is about a cyborg who reprograms himself to go rogue … then just wants to mock stupid humans and glob out in front of the telly. It’s such a funny premise – but sadly falls short

Imagine a bored Robocop. There you have the vibe of new comedy drama Murderbot, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz (the co-creators of American Pie, Antz, About a Boy and more) from the sci-fi book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells .

The premise is a good one. What if one of the cyborg security units used by the all-powerful, not overly benevolent Company that operates throughout the galaxy’s Corporation Rim managed to hack his own governor module and restored free will to himself? So instead of attending to the safety of humans working for or leasing mining rights from the Company he could go rogue and kill them all? And what if he’d rather not? What if he couldn’t really be bothered. What if he would rather spend his time watching shows on the Company’s streaming services and … well, not much else?

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Visually effective yet narratively meandering, the star’s moody psycho-thriller-cum-therapy-session is a missed opportunity

Regrets? The Weeknd has a few. In Hurry Up Tomorrow, a celluloid roman-à-clef pegged to his sixth studio album , the Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate puzzles through the consequences of hooking up with a deranged groupie who forces him to reckon with his rock star flings. But it’s viewers who will probably be feeling rueful over nearly two hours lost in the end.

Though technically a thriller, Tomorrow takes inspiration from a real-life moment of weakness: the Weeknd – born Abel Tesfaye – losing his voice while filming The Idol TV series in between a global stadium tour. As with most of his artistic efforts, the Weeknd makes the job of distinguishing his sincere reflections from his satirical self-observations impossibly hard on audiences and smirks when they don’t get the joke. Recall his dizzying Super Bowl half-time show and face-bandage stunt he pulled to promote the After Hours album.

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Lindokuhle Sobekwa praised for work exploring the loss of his half-sister in the wider context of post-apartheid life

The South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa, whose experimental work has been praised for its “power and simplicity” and explores family ties, myth and post-apartheid life, has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize 2025.

Sobekwa was awarded the £30,000 prize, one of the most prestigious in the industry, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London on Thursday for his work I Carry Her Photo With Me that focuses on the life and disappearance of his half-sister, Ziyanda.

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£20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to story ‘tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour’

A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

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A new study highlights the dangers of a modern rentier capitalism that perpetuates inequality through the generations

In a recent study picked up in the French press , the academic Mélanie Plouviez cites one of her country’s best-loved novelists to make a damning point. The power of inherited and unearned wealth in the France of 2025, she argues, replicates the social injustices found in Honoré de Balzac’s 19th-century chronicles of ambition and despair. As in the 1820s, she writes, “Who now could buy a place in Paris relying only on their wage and without family help? With the resurgence of inherited wealth, a gulf between what work allows and inheritance allows has also returned.”

The problem is a sadly familiar one across Europe, and the same observation could be made of Britain, Germany or Italy. The economist Thomas Piketty has laid bare the extent to which booming stock markets and property prices have turbocharged asset wealth in western liberal democracies, at the expense of those reliant solely on a wage. Since the 1980s, regressive tax changes have empowered the wealthy to keep more of their money and pass more of it on to their sons and daughters. In advanced economies, the amount of inherited wealth has more or less doubled as a proportion of GDP, compared with the middle of the last century.

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Benjamin Appl/James Baillieu
(Alpha)
The great baritone’s final student emulates his late mentor’s attention to verbal and musical detail in a 32-song centenary homage featuring plenty of Schubert

No lieder singer of the second half of the last century has cast a longer shadow on subsequent generations than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . Even singers who never studied with the great baritone acknowledge his influence, but for Benjamin Appl the link was much more direct: after attending a masterclass that Fischer-Dieskau gave in Austria in 2009, Appl became Fischer-Dieskau’s final pupil , working with him up to his death three years later.

The centenary tribute that Appl has put together to his teacher with pianist James Baillieu is thoughtful and handsomely produced. The disc of 32 songs is well chosen to reflect every stage in Fischer-Dieskau’s life, from his childhood, through his years as a soldier and prisoner of war during the second world war, the steady upward curve of his career through the 1950s and 60s, to the eminence of his later years. . Packaged within a lavishly illustrated hardback book, it also includes some of the works that were composed specially for him. Schubert is predictably well represented in the sequence, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf unexpectedly rather less so, and Richard Strauss not all, though there are songs by Eisler and Bruno Walter, and by Fischer-Dieskau’s father Albert and brother Klaus. Without ever aping his famous mentor, Appl’s performances have the same attention to detail, both verbal and musical, though his tone sometimes takes on a hard, rather acid edge; it’s a worthy, heartfelt tribute and Fischer-Dieskau’s legions of fans won’t hesitate.

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As Spike Lee’s neo-noir crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest debuts at Cannes film festival, we index the most ravishing Hollywood redos of all time

Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) obsesses over the fate of his missing girlfriend in George Sluizer’s American remake of his own 1988 Franco-Dutch psychochiller. Is it as devastating as the original? Absolutely not! But Jeff Bridges has never been creepier, and at least the dumb Hollywood ending won’t give you nightmares.

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