Brigitte Bardot, the French actress and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning to animal rights activism, has passed away aged 91.
Bardot had been ill in hospital in Toulon, according to local media. The star’s animal rights charity announced her passing on Sunday morning with a statement.
‘The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation,’ it said.
The organisation did not specify the time or place where Bardot died.
A planned Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Trump Kennedy Center was canceled after the show’s woke host pulled out in protest of President Donald Trump.
Famed drummer and vibraphone player Chuck Redd has been presiding over holiday Jazz Jams at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William Keter Betts.
But he canceled the annual concert, a holiday tradition dating back more than 20 years, this year after being ‘saddened’ by the performance hall’s rebrand.
‘When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,’ Redd told AP in an email Wednesday.
As of last Friday, the performance center in DC‘s façade reads The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) briefly posted and then removed a 12-second video that appeared to show Jeffrey Epstein attempting to commit suicide in his Manhattan jail cell. The grainy footage showed a man in an orange jumpsuit, purportedly Epstein, on his knees beside his bunk, seemingly trying to choke himself, with a timestamp indicating 4:29 a.m. on August 10, 2019—about two hours before he was found dead.
However, the video was quickly identified as likely fake. Reports indicated it had circulated on 4chan and was not authentic surveillance footage. Analysis revealed inconsistencies such as mismatched cell doors and unnatural orange “puddles” resembling prison clothes, suggesting digital alteration. The video was not original to the DOJ; it had been sent to investigators in 2021 by an independent journalist who found it on the dark web, and it was included in the document release as an attachment to an email questioning its authenticity.
The DOJ uploaded the video as part of a large document dump released on December 19, 2025, ahead of an 11:59 p.m. deadline. It was removed shortly afterward amid growing public and media scrutiny over its legitimacy, with the incident sparking controversy about the handling and verification of materials in the release.
Note: This is a satirical xiangsheng (相聲/crosstalk) routine by Taiwanese comedian Huang Yihao (黃逸豪), performed recently and widely shared online. The humor relies on exaggeration, wordplay, and direct political mockery, highlighting contrasts in freedom of expression between Taiwan and mainland China. The poem at the end is a classic crosstalk punchline structure.
Chinese crosstalk comedy can be difficult to understand if you are not a native speaker, but some of the skits are understandable, and their humor readily accessible. I am posting this skit because it has become very popular, mainly for its political content, and also to introduce this Chinese comedic artform to readers who may be interested. ABN
Original Chinese Text (Transcription from the Performance)（逗哏：黃逸豪）現在的事，看今朝，在西方，有一東方大國。（捧哏：地理位置太亂了！）這國家亂的不只是地理位置！此人身高約莫一米七八，大背頭、小眼睛、短脖子、肉鼻頭、身形肥膩、貌似維尼。（觀眾大笑）上台之後，廢除任期，修憲連任，港版國安，香港不安，一國兩制，變成一國一制，動態清零，封城三年，經濟崩壞，民不聊生，房地產爆雷，地方債務高築，青年失業率高達20%，白紙革命，民怨沸騰，戰狼外交，四處樹敵，舉國之力堵悠悠之口，愚民排外成就千古一帝。這正是：治國猶如翻大餅， 麾下戰狼粉紅兵。 倒車油門總加速， 第一傻X習近平！（全場熱烈鼓掌，觀眾齊喊：第一傻X習近平！）
English Translation:
Things nowadays, look at the present: In the West, there is an Eastern power.(Straight man: The geography is too messed up!) This country’s chaos isn’t just in its geography! This person is about 1.78 meters tall, with a big slicked-back hairstyle, small eyes, short neck, fleshy nose, plump figure, resembling Winnie the Pooh. (Audience laughs) After coming to power, he abolished term limits, amended the constitution for lifelong rule; the Hong Kong National Security Law made Hong Kong insecure; “one country, two systems” became “one country, one system”; dynamic zero-COVID led to three years of lockdowns; the economy collapsed, people struggled to survive; real estate bubble burst, local debts skyrocketed; youth unemployment reached 20%; the White Paper Revolution with boiling public resentment; wolf warrior diplomacy creating enemies everywhere; using the power of the whole nation to silence public opinion, fooling the people and fostering xenophobia to achieve the status of an emperor for eternity. This is exactly: Governing the country is like flipping a big pancake, With wolf warriors and little pinks as soldiers under command. Always accelerating in reverse, The number one idiot Xi Jinping! (Audience applauds enthusiastically and shouts in unison: The number one idiot Xi Jinping!)
Taiwanese comedian Huang Yihao’s xiangsheng routine mocks Xi Jinping’s policies like COVID lockdowns, Hong Kong’s security law, and term-limit abolition, delivered in traditional crosstalk style with exaggerated gestures and props for comedic effect.
The skit, shared widely on X since December 21, 2025, highlights Taiwan’s press freedoms, contrasting mainland China’s 2023 crackdown on similar satire that fined a comedian’s firm $3.1 million for a military slogan joke.
Online reactions split along political lines: pro-independence users hail its boldness and superior humor to censored Chinese acts, while some critics decry the Taiwanese accent as disqualifying it from true xiangsheng tradition.
Chinese Crosstalk Tradition
Xiangsheng, commonly known as crosstalk, is a traditional Chinese comedic performing art that originated in the late Qing Dynasty, with roots potentially extending back to the Ming Dynasty. It is typically performed as a dialogue between two performers, though it can also be a monologue or a group act. The art form is characterized by rapid, bantering exchanges rich in puns, wordplay, and allusions, often delivered in the Tianjin dialect or with a strong northern Chinese accent. The term “xiangsheng” literally means “face and voice,” reflecting the interplay between the performers’ expressions and vocal delivery.
The performance relies on four core skills: speaking (shuō), which involves storytelling and joke-telling; imitating (xué), including accents, dialects, and sounds from traditional Chinese opera; teasing (dòu), considered the soul of the act; and singing (chàng), limited to specific lyrical forms like Taiping lyrics The lead performer is called the dougen (逗哏), while the supporting performer is the penggen (捧哏) Historically, xiangsheng began as street performance in teahouses and public spaces, particularly in regions like Beijing’s Tianqiao, Tianjin’s Quanyechang, and Nanjing’s Confucius Temple
Sepehr has produced many interesting videos, some of which I post. They can be controversial, but that is a plus in my view. Our ancient past needs to be rethought and reimagined. We all come from somewhere, all of us are mixtures, but human groups did and still do differ enormously. These differences are very often reflected in cultural norms across the world. The more realistic we are about the past and the present, the better. Today’s cascade of genetic information seems to be getting reasonably sifted through to yield solid new insights. My main friendly criticism of Sepehr’s work is he puts himself in his videos so often, some of them are unwatchable (for me) even though the content is otherwise worthy. He has risen to prominence quickly, so maybe putting himself in there has been a good PR idea. I really mean this as friendly, respectful criticism only. ABN
I’m a chinese from a rural village in Southern China. I stumbled upon this Sub and found that lot of people here never actual been to China, less likely they have been to rural China, which still take up most part of china. so I want to share what I’ve seen and heard over the last thirty years to show you a slice of the rural China—in real life. Not very good in English, please excuse the grammar mistakes.
I grew up in a small village in Southern China. a bit isolated. The population merely past 1,000. Everyone in the village have the same surname. As a kid, I thought the whole world had the same surname until like 7 or 8 years old, when a girl with a different surname move to our village, this thing reshaped my worldview, like, “there is actual other people outside our village?”
Beside being isolated, the village was dirt-Poor.
How poor? We had no Flush Toilet, no, no Flush Toilet, no underground pipe system. Every household had two big buckets. one for the liquid human waste, one for the solid waste, Aka fecal. when the liquid waste bucket was full, we took it out to the fields to water the crops. When the poop bucket was full, well, some with morality will carry it to a public pit. some would just dump it onto the street. one thing I learn about poverty, if you can’t afford food, you can’t afford morality. so, most go to the street.
so as a school child, commuting to school took extreme caution, you never knew what you may step on. the worse thing is, when it rain, the alley would became a small river of fecal and piss, you had to walk like a ballet dancer to avoid them.
The hygiene was bad, the education was worse. We had one class, one teacher. The teacher was short, we nickname him Mr shorttie, Mr shorttie only finished middle school, that already crown him the most educated person in the village. He taught writing, Math, and sport, basically everything. Mr shorttie had like six daughters, he beated his wife a lot because she can’t gave him a son to carry his blood line.
When I was in 6th grade, the government said we had to learn English. But Mr shorttie only knew the 26 letters of the alphabet. So, He only teach the alphabet.
Mr shorttie had three teaching skills: the Belt whip, the Face slap, and the knee Kick. personally, I think the last one hurt the most.
Our school was just a brick house with a tile roof. When it rained, it leaked. Once, a typhoon took down a tree onto the roof, tiles rained down and smashed two kids. the school had no money to hire cleaners, so they hire us intead, zero pay, of course. We spent like a week to clean up the rubble.
Many in comments say this rendition is overdone or ‘too strong’. But it does help to imagine the event, which may have occurred many times and will again someday soonish. ABN
American Buddhist Net 