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3 weeks ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Harvard has raised the stakes in its fightback against the US government. On Monday, the world’s richest university sued the Trump administration over its freezing of $2.3 billion in funding. The lawsuit claims the administration’s actions are unlawful, arbitrary and violate the university’s rights to free speech. This was followed yesterday by a joint statement signed by more than 170 university leaders who criticised the “political interference now endangering American higher education”.
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4 weeks ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Harvard has rejected Donald Trump’s demands for sweeping reforms aimed at purging “woke” ideology from America’s oldest and richest university. So what? It could hardly do otherwise. In a social media post on Wednesday Trump accused Harvard of hiring “Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’”. He added that Harvard “is a joke, teaches hate and stupidity and should no longer receive federal funds”.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
As reported here yesterday, young cinemagoers are being warned against bad behaviour in screenings of A Minecraft Movie. For Hollywood, the film is proving good as gold. Before its release last weekend, the industry was facing its worst March box office in decades and Warner Bros. studio bosses were rumoured to be facing the chop. Reviews of A Minecraft Movie were dreadful: “an expensively cheap, 100 per cent corporate mess”, “boring, bad and annoying”, “a hyperactive hot pink mess”.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
There is presumably a safe in Hollywood where they keep the spy/assassin/ordinary-man-taking-revenge script and it’s carved from ancient wood with names picked out in solid gold. Bourne. Taken. John Wick. Kill Bill. Point Blank. The Equalizer. And The Amateur? It won’t be joining them. It has a promising premise. Geeky CIA cryptographer Rami Malek’s wife is murdered in a London terrorist attack, and he goes postal.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Based on the eponymous true-life podcast about Molly Kochan, Dying for Sex tells the story of a 42-year-old woman with incurable breast cancer who leaves her husband to embark on a quest into her own sexuality. The show is heartbreaking and hilarious – often in the same conversation. Michelle Williams delivers a tour de force as Molly, who deals with her childhood trauma while searching for her first ever orgasm.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Disney’s Snow White remake is heading for a nine-figure loss and YouTube may be about to surpass the company as the world’s biggest media organisation. So what? These are the least of Disney’s worries. Last week the US Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the company over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies. FCC chairman Brendan Carr has since warned that the broadcast licence of Disney’s parent company, ABC, is at risk. Welcome to Trump’s war on diversity.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Snow White suffered a sharp 66 per cent fall at the US box office in its second weekend, taking $14.2 million and being replaced at number one by Jason Statham’s new action film A Working Man. Part of the story is that the Disney remake is a political hot mess. Snow White star Rachel Zegler has been attacked over her Latina background, anti-Trump posts, and support of Palestine. Meanwhile Zegler’s advocacy has reportedly alienated Israeli co-star Gal Gadot, who has received death threats.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
There is no surefire way to make a Hollywood hit, but representation may help. Five of the ten highest grossing films in 2024 had women in at least 50 per cent of key roles, according to an annual report from the LA gender equality coalition ReFrame. The group ‘stamps’ films that have women or underrepresented genders in half of major positions from directors to writers, actors, composers and effects supervisors.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Built around the disturbing image of a ward full of young women drugged into weeks of enforced sleep and woken only for electroshock therapy, Jon Stock’s remarkable and revealing investigation into the discredited British psychiatrist William Sargant weaves together the bleak and the gothic. Irritated by the rise of talking therapy, Sargant spent the post-war years assaulting the brain with drugs, shocks and lobotomies to force (mainly) women out of depression, anxiety and other conditions.
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1 month ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Apple TV+ has been losing $1 billion a year since its 2019 launch, with more than $20 billion spent on original content that has brought in 45 million subscribers. This leaked data is the capstone to a bad month for the trillion-dollar company. Apple’s stock price has dropped about 10 per cent so far this month, iPhone sales have been falling, analysts fear the effects of American tariffs and AI boss John Giannandrea was replaced last week following the glacial roll-out of Apple Intelligence.
