Lifestyle News

WASHINGTON — The Scripps National Spelling Bee is undergoing a major overhaul to ensure it can identify a single champion, adding vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker to this year's pandemic-altered competition.

LOS ANGELES — Shock G, who blended whimsical wordplay with reverence for '70s funk as leader of the off-kilter Bay Area hip-hop group Digital Underground, has died. He was 57.

LONDON — Noah Thomas saw his name in lights, and then the lights went out. The young actor was still in drama school when he was cast to play the lead role in the London West End musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

MILAN — LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and Tod’s founder Diego Dalle Valle are further cementing their 20-year friendship with a deal for the French group to increase its stake in the Italian luxury goods maker.

NEW YORK — Gal Gadot is using her Hollywood starpower to spotlight remarkable women from around the world.

The first death in the “Mortal Kombat” reboot occurs less than three minutes in, which is actually pretty coy. This is a movie, after all, based on a video game where the point is bloody violence.

TORONTO — Hate crime complaints and arrests in the country's largest city jumped sharply last year, with Jewish and Black people the most common targets, according to an annual police report released on Thursday.

A variant that appears to be wreaking havoc in India has been detected in Canada and sparked a temporary ban on direct passenger flights from India and Pakistan on Thursday.

It may be hard to believe that there are still many “firsts” left to check off after 93 years of the Academy Awards, and yet this year there were a handful for Asian actors and filmmakers.

LONDON — Les McKeown, the former lead singer of the 1970s Scottish pop sensation Bay City Rollers, has died suddenly at the age of 65, his family said Thursday.