Thousands sign petition opposing Kanye West's headline slot at Slovak music festival
A petition urging the mayor to cancel his appearance describes the booking as 'an insult to historic memory, a glorification of wartime violence and debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime'.
The Rubicon festival, which bills itself as a cultural event of 'vision and provocation,' revealed plans for an exclusive mid-July performance by what it called a 'hip-hop visionary, cultural icon, and controversial genius.'
However, more than 3,600 people have signed a petition - endorsed by groups including Peace for Ukraine and Cities for Democracy - demanding Ye's removal from the lineup. It accuses the artist of 'repeatedly and openly adhering to symbols and [an] ideology connected with the darkest period of modern global history'.
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The 48-year-old rapper has remained in the headlines for a long string of increasingly controversial and provocative antics. These include accusations of controlling behaviour toward his wife, Bianca Censori; the sale of Swastika-emblazoned T-shirts on his now-taken down Yeezy retail site; and most recently, the release of a track titled Heil Hitler on 8 May - coinciding with the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat.
The online petition also warns that West's appearance could attract 'radical and extremist groups from Slovakia and abroad' and cited 'legitimate concern about the appearance of Nazi symbolism, violent behaviour or the spread of ideology that is unacceptable in a democratic society and criminal in our country'.
Meanwhile, West - who recently made a brief appearance at the sex-trafficking trial of Sean 'Diddy' Combs - is expected to release a full version of his 12th album Bully, following the leak of several incomplete editions earlier this year.
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Politico
3 hours ago
- Politico
The UK's new tech law triggers upheaval
For would-be American tech regulators — and the companies in their sights — the last four days in the UK offer a bracing lesson in unintended consequences. A new law to promote online safety in the United Kingdom has swept up a lot more content than social media users expected, and a wide range of advocacy groups and disgruntled consumers are rising to object. The UK's Online Safety Act took effect Friday to shield minors from 'harmful' content — not just pornography, but also material that is hateful, promotes substance abuse or depicts 'serious violence.' The rules apply to any site accessible in the UK, even those based in the U.S. This means sites like Reddit, Bluesky and even Grindr now have to abide by the OSA's speech regulations to stay online in the country. 'It doesn't matter where in the world it is, and it doesn't matter what they're focused on,' said Preston Byrne, managing partner at the tech law firm Byrne & Storm. 'Much of what we consider the ordinary sturm und drang of American political discourse — the ordinary back and forth — in the United Kingdom is unlawful.' Over the weekend, major U.S.-based platforms implemented measures to comply with the law, and promptly became harder to access. By using a VPN to simulate UK web browsing, DFD was able to confirm reports that content relating to Gaza on X and cigars on Reddit was more restricted in the UK than in the U.S. Some required verification checks necessitating a photo ID or a selfie to verify age. Other content was blocked entirely, though some X posts on Gaza were later restored. The UK law may not strictly apply to such content, but social media companies apparently aren't chancing it. Gab, a U.S.-based platform that hosts Nazi and other extremist content, has gone completely dark in the UK to avoid financial and criminal penalties under the safety act. 'Many platforms may [...] err on the side of caution to avoid getting caught up in that, and age-gate more than is necessary,' said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow at the Cato institute. The parallels with U.S. age laws aren't exact — the First Amendment has more robust protections for hate speech and other content than UK law — but to many watchers, the rollout is a lesson in what happens when lines start to be drawn around the free flow of online information. The debut of the OSA has been met with swift pushback. After a petition to repeal the act received more than 350,000 signatures, the UK government responded Monday that it had no plans to do so. Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform UK party, has also pledged to repeal the act. VPNs, which route a user's internet traffic through another country, have hit the top of the UK's app download charts. President Donald Trump seemed fairly unbothered by the law during his trip to Scotland on Monday, joking about how it might impact his platform, Truth Social. When asked about it during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said, 'Well, I don't think he's [Starmer's] going to censor my site, because I say only good things… will you please uncensor my site?' Proprietors of other U.S.-based social media sites aren't so sure. Reddit, X, Discord and BlueSky have all implemented age verification checks and other measures to abide by the safety act. Wikipedia is also challenging the act in a UK court, though the lawsuit regards a different provision that would require it to identify many of its contributors. The penalties for failing to comply may be severe. The country's Office of Communications, which oversees the safety act, has sent enforcement letters to at least three websites operating outside of the UK in March and April. Byrne exclusively provided DFD with letters that Ofcom sent to Gab and a site that promotes suicide, and directed DFD to another sent to Kiwi Farms, an online forum that has been criticized for enabling harassment and cyberstalking. The letters demand that the sites conduct 'illegal content risk assessments' and provide a report to Ofcom of the presence of CSAM, material promoting drugs and weapons, hate speech and other types of 'illegal content.' They also note that failure to comply with the directives could result in a fine of £18 million or 10 percent of worldwide revenue, and 'may also constitute a criminal offence.' Ofcom did not respond to DFD's questions about the letters. Gab CEO Andrew Torba told DFD that Gab has reached out to the U.S. government for help. '[W]e hope President Trump will remind the British that American speech is governed by the Constitution, not British prosecutors,' he wrote in an email. The White House referred DFD to Trump's exchange with Starmer when asked about the matter. Kiwi Farms and the site promoting suicide did not respond. The implementation of the OSA comes shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld age verification laws that at least 23 states have in place. While those laws focus on pornography and are more limited than the UK's law, the rollout of the safety act may offer certain lessons for states passing and enforcing age verification requirements. 'We're seeing that regardless of where you implement these laws and these measures, users are still frustrated,' said Paige Collings, senior speech and privacy activists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who pointed out that Florida also saw a spike in searches for VPNs after it implemented an online porn law in January 'The more of this that we see, it feels like it should be harder for policymakers to continue ignoring the mounting pressure and continue pursuing this approach,' she told DFD, adding that more targeted regulation for data collection and content moderation algorithms could be a better method of keeping kids safe online. EU agrees to buy €40B in U.S. AI chips After European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the European Union would continue buying U.S. semiconductors in a meeting with Trump on Sunday, the bloc has put a price tag on that promise. As POLITICO's Pieter Haeck reports, the EU announced on Tuesday that it would buy '€40 billion worth of AI chips' from the U.S., which it said was 'essential to maintaining the EU's technological edge.' The purchase is part of the trade deal that von der Leyen and Trump struck over the weekend, which allows the U.S. and EU to steer clear of a tariff war. The semiconductor purchase pledge is a win-win. Trump has not only wanted to increase exports, but is also pursuing a strategy of aggressively disseminating chips around the world to keep other countries reliant on the American tech stack. Meanwhile, the EU has no domestic production capacity to manufacture advanced chips for AI — Intel notably canceled plans last week to build fabrication plants in Germany and Poland. Subsea cables are making a comeback There's renewed policy interest among Big Tech firms and in Congress surrounding subsea cables, which lie thousands of feet below the sea and are crucial to global telecommunications, POLITICO's Anthony Adragna reports. Subsea cables are one of those seemingly niche policy areas that keep very large companies up at night. Google, Meta and Microsoft have lobbied Congress during the second quarter on the national security concerns related to the cables. Warfare or maritime accidents could sever digital communications between countries — fewer than 500 undersea cables accounted for 99 percent of transoceanic digital communications in 2022, according to a Congressional Services report. Lawmakers are mobilizing around the issue. China Committee Chair John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) and Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) sent a letter to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta inquiring about potential vulnerabilities last week. The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a bill in April to prevent foreign adversaries from building their own cables, while another pending bipartisan bill would institute more measures to protect this subsea infrastructure. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Aaron Mak (amak@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
Fast Company
3 hours ago
- Fast Company
The simple way American Eagle could have avoided the Sydney Sweeney situation
A big American brand partners with a young, beautiful celebrity in what it thinks is a clever and iconic piece of advertising. But as soon as the ad drops, the reaction is exactly the opposite of what the brand was hoping for. There is an immediate backlash against how the ad has casually, and ignorantly, waded into issues like identity politics, societal divisions, and systemic racism. Sound familiar? Of course, it sounds a helluva lot like the swamp of hot takes American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney currently find themselves wandering waist-deep in. But I was actually talking about the infamous Pepsi and Kendall Jenner ad from 2017. So much has changed since then, but oh, how any given brand's lack of cultural awareness can remain constant. Last week, American Eagle dropped a new campaign of ads featuring Sweeney. One has her sensually sliding into a pair of jeans while explaining what genes are. 'Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,' she said. 'My jeans are blue.' Cut to a male voice-over and tagline: 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.' That double entendre between denim and genetic traits immediately raised the ire of the internet, with many pointing to the very blond hair and blue eyes of the campaign's star as a complicated and divisive ideal to be touting in 2025. Accusations hurled at the brand ranged from plain ignorance to full-on Nazi propaganda. On the other end are those finding fresh fodder for their screams against the 'woke mind virus.' Wherever you stand on that spectrum, there is no denying the fact that the campaign has gone much bigger than it ever would have as a result of this outsize negative reaction. No matter what anyone says, this was certainly not the brand's intention. Defining moment This was no one-off social post, but a full-throated brand extravaganza. American Eagle chief marketing officer Craig Brommers was hyping its scale on LinkedIn last week, about how it would hit the Sphere in Las Vegas, 3D billboards in Times Square and L.A., a Euphoria partnership with HBO Max, and more. 'A massive thank-you and CONGRATULATIONS to our internal teams and external partners—and SYDNEY herself—for this defining moment,' Brommers wrote. Ashley Schapiro, American Eagle's vice president of marketing, media, performance, and engagement, wrote a LinkedIn post outlining part of the process. She said that on a Zoom call with Sweeney, they asked her, 'How far do you want to push it?' 'Without hesitation, she smirked and said, 'Let's push it. I'm game.' Our response? 'Challenge Accepted,'' Schapiro wrote. 'From that moment on, Syd's sentiment guided every frame, every stitch and every unexpected twist of the 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans'👖campaign. Infusing our own personal cheeky energy and making us 😂 as we envisioned how the world would experience the launch. … The ⭐️ star power of Sydney and the double meaning behind the campaign has a culture-shaping power beyond anything I could have ever imagined being a part of—just check your social feeds.' There are any number of ways to talk about this ad and campaign overall—from whether it intentionally or not promotes outdated genetic ideals to whether the intended audience is people who buy jeans or those buying meme stocks. But let's look at these spots as creative advertising ideas. Reheated ideas The spot featuring Sweeney squeezing into a pair of jeans while lying down and doling out a genetics lesson is a remarkable facsimile of Calvin Klein's 1980 spot with Brooke Shields giving her own breakdown of genetics while … you guessed it … squeezing into a pair of jeans while lying down. Another Sweeney spot has her going all meta, insisting that she's not trying to get you to buy American Eagle jeans at all. This hews incredibly close to a 2017 Sprite ad starring LeBron James, in which the NBA star insists that he's not here to convince you to drink the soda at all. Just like the controversy itself, the ideas here aren't new. But there was a very simple way to feature the exact same work without all the negative baggage. Meaning over intent Marcus Collins, a consultant, author, and University of Michigan marketing professor, often writes about brands as vessels for meaning. Meaning is subjective, not objective, and that is something all brand marketers need to keep in mind. On Instagram, Collins said: 'Despite whatever the intentions the brand had in making this ad, what it communicates to people is that there is a prototypical standard for good genes: white, blonde hair, blue eyes. And of course, especially considering the political and social cultural backdrop that we're in right now, that could seem like some pretty bad dog whistling.' Collins goes on to outline how American Eagle could have done this campaign without the whistle. Why not feature other people, who may still be objectively beautiful, to illustrate a variety of good jeans? Collins points to stars like Idris Elba or Halle Berry, but American Eagle needn't even have looked outside their own brand roster. Last year, the brand launched a collab collection with tennis star Coco Gauff, as well as her second ad campaign for the slogan 'Live Your Life.' The 21-year-old is not only in the brand's ideal age bracket, she's also smart, stylish, beautiful, and just happens to have a collection of 19 professional tennis trophies, including the 2023 U.S. Open and 2025 French Open titles. Now, those are some pretty damn good jeans, too. The early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, September 5, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
New York Post
9 hours ago
- New York Post
Shane Tamura identified as NYC shooter who murdered NYPD officer and others
27-year-old Shane Tamura gunned down a New York City Police officer and others in a Manhattan skyscraper, home to the NFL and Blackstone offices, aid trucks have made it into Gaza after Israel agrees to pause some attacks, and Sydney Sweeney is under fire for a new ad campaign some are calling 'Nazi propaganda.'
