Entertainment
Putin to join President Xi and world leaders at SCO meeting in China
TIANJIN: Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to arrive in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on Sunday, where he will join President Xi Jinping and around 20 other world leaders for a major regional summit.
The gathering, organised under the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), will run until Monday and comes just days before a huge military parade in Beijing marking 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.
China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance.
In an interview published on China’s Xinhua news agency on Saturday, Putin said the upcoming summit will “strengthen the SCO’s capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space”.
“All this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” Putin said, Xinhua reported.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms like the SCO to curry influence.
“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
“In short, it offers a Chinese-inflected multilateral order that is distinct from the western-dominated ones in international politics,” Loh told AFP.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian and Turkish presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan will attend the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
“The large-scale participation indicates China’s growing influence and the SCO’s appeal as a platform for non-Western countries,” Loh added.
Beijing, through the SCO, will try to “project influence and signal that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game”, said Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It is framed as something different, built around sovereignty, non-interference, and multipolarity, which the Chinese tout as a model,” Lee told AFP.
Talks on the sidelines
Chinese President Xi met leaders including Egyptian Premier Moustafa Madbouly and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet in Tianjin on Saturday.
Other bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the summit will be organised.
Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Turkey’s Erdogan and Iran’s Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear programme respectively.
Putin needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage and also the support of the second largest economy in the world”, said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.
“Russia is also keen to win over India, and India’s trade frictions with the United States present this opportunity,” Lim told AFP.
The summit comes days after India was hit by a sharp bump up in US tariffs on its goods as punishment for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Tianjin on Saturday evening after a trip to Japan, marking the start of his first visit to China since 2018.
The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.
A thaw began last October when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
Modi was not on a list of attendees for the Beijing parade published by Chinese state media on Thursday that included Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.
Entertainment
‘Saturday Night Live’ alum Tina Fey admits past jokes missed the mark
Saturday Night Live veteran Tina Fey reflected on her years at the NBC sketch institution, acknowledging that some of her jokes were “on the wrong side”.
Speaking at the History Talks event in Philadelphia, Fey said she’s realized with time that not every punchline was fair.
The two times Globe Globe winner added candidly, “I was pretty dumb.”
Fey joined SNL in 1997 and later became head writer.
She recalled navigating some of the show’s most difficult broadcasts, from the first episode after September 11 to the anthrax scare and even President George W. Bush’s visit to meet Will Ferrell.
Over time, she said, the line between comedy and current events grew thinner, with politicians and public figures often responding directly to the sketches.
One of her most memorable stretches came in 2008, when she teamed with Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler to craft the now iconic Sarah Palin sketches.
Fey explained that the team worked hard to make sure their material was “a fair hit,” grounded in truth rather than random exaggeration.
“If it’s not true, it will not be funny,” she noted.
Reflecting on the influence of SNL, Fey said it was both thrilling and intimidating to know that what she wrote could be taken seriously by people in power.
She emphasized that the show never set out to control politics or the national narrative, but admitted that some of her own jokes didn’t age well.
Fey appeared alongside Nicole Kidman, Ted Danson, Kate McKinnon, Colin Jost and others at the event, which marked the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Entertainment
Prince William’s ally Robert Irwin rejects Prince Harry, Meghan offer
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle appeared to completed a successful four-day tour to Down Under, as they received a warm welcome from the Aussies.
The optics of the visit worked in the Sussexes’s favour, having plenty of similarities to an official royal tour. However, there was one particular item on their to-do list which they were not able to accomplish after facing a major rejection.
The Irwin family is hugely popular in Australia and especially with Robert Irwin’s work and amplified fame after winning Dancing with the Stars, they hold a special prestige in the country. So much so, Prince William has made Robert one of the ambassadors of the Earthshot Prize, a deeply personal and important initiative William had taken over five years ago.
Hence, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were hoping to get a meeting with the Irwins especially the celebrity conservationist at Australia Zoo in Queensland. However, it was not possible during the four-day trip, per New Idea magazine.
The source revealed that there is “no ill-will” towards the Sussexes from the Irwins and cited that it “wasn’t possible”. Although, it is key to note that they are all “staunch monarchists and fiercely loyal to The Firm”.
“Aligning with the Irwins’ worthy causes is something that Meghan and Harry could be on board with,” the source said. But, it seems that Robert may have played it safe as he did not want to upset William.
Entertainment
Breakthrough Prize laureate David Gross drops shocking prediction for humanity
David Gross has won the Special Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics with a whopping $3 million prize, as announced by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation on April 18, 2026.
The prize honors scientists whose discoveries have contributed significant advancement to the development of human knowledge.
The Breakthrough Prizes—commonly known as the ’Oscars of Science’—were established in 2012 to celebrate the wonders of the 21st century scientific age.
David Gross, who is a Nobel Prize laureate in Physics (2004), served as director at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara for three decades.
What earned Gross winning Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics?
In the early 1970s, there was a wide gap in quantum field theory, as it could not define the strong nuclear force, which holds the atom’s nucleus together.
But in 1973, Gross and his graduate student Frank Wilczek cracked the mystery.
They discovered that the strong force works the opposite way to familiar forces like gravity: it gets weaker as particles approach each other, but stronger as they move apart.
That discovery led to the development of quantum chromodynamics.
After taking home the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, he drops a shocking prediction for humanity in an interview with LiveScience.
Gross, when asked if humanity will ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons.
Gross predicted, “We’re not recommending that. That’s idealistic, but yet, I hope so. Because if you don’t, there’s always some risk an AI 100 years from now, but chances of (humanity) living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal.”
Gross became one of this year’s six awardees for his contributions to theoretical physics, earning the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
David Gross has remained an authority in fundamental physics for six decades.
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