Category: today’s top story

“Authorities in an impoverished Palestinian refugee camp have shut down a youth orchestra, boarded up its rehearsal studio and banned its conductor from the camp after she took 13 young musicians to perform for Holocaust survivors in Israel, an official said Sunday. Conductor Wafa Younes took the children from her Strings of Freedom orchestra to sing songs of peace last week as part of an annual Good Deeds Day organized by Israel’s richest woman.”

“With NPR facing a projected $8 million budget deficit and looming cutbacks, some of its most prominent program hosts are urging management to consider a direct, on-air appeal to NPR’s listeners — something that’s prohibited by the organization’s bylaws.”

“The Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London were the world’s most visited museums last year, drawing 8.5 million and 5.93 million people respectively, the Art Newspaper said in an annual ranking.”

The world’s largest music store, Apple’s iTunes, plans to boost the price of many hit singles and selected classic tracks to $1.29 on April 7, breaking the psychological barrier of 99 cents in what could be the first big test of how much consumers are willing to pay to download individual songs.

“Fresh life was breathed into the controversy over nude paintings of the Taoiseach which were found hanging in two Dublin art galleries after it emerged that a Garda detective had visited the offices of a national radio station looking for emails it had received from the artist. The news came after RTÉ apologised for a television news report concerning the nude portraits of Mr Cowen.”

“Among the enduring questions of modern times is whether professional wrestling is real or pretend. Washington-state bureaucrats have opened a new chapter in the debate by ruling that wrestling is a real form of sport even when it consists of a man in a banana suit performing fake kung-fu moves in a tavern.” As a result, a Seattle group that calls what it does “fight cabaret” must meet safety regulations whose costs threaten its existence.

“So serious is the orchestra’s position, in fact, that music director Franz Welser-Möst and executive director Gary Hanson volunteered to take pay cuts of 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively, reductions amounting to over $300,000.” In addition, some subscription and touring programs will be dropped: “The orchestra will cancel any concerts projected to be unprofitable.”

“A backlog of funding applications on the desk of Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore has left dance groups across the country looking at cancelling programming and scrambling to make provisional plans. A number of members of the CanDance Network, an association of 31 specialized dance presenters, still have no answers to applications they submitted last April for funding for 2009-2010 projects. The wait is making it nearly impossible for them to arrange tours and performances….”

Corporate and private rentals, budgeted as a significant source of income for Toronto’s recently renovated Art Gallery of Ontario, took a dive with the economy. So did gift-shop and restaurant receipts. “That is why within the next month or two the AGO, like most other museums in North America, will likely have to cut costs, including laying off up to 10 per cent of its 600 employees, reducing hours and other penny-pinching measures.”