News Desk

An unexploded US kamikaze drone was found on farmland in Western Iraq on Monday. The low-cost drones have reportedly been used in US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

‘What is needed now in the region more than anything, is a way out.’ The UN Secretary-General is urging a cessation of hostilities and de-escalation amidst the ongoing US and Israeli military offensive against Iran.

The BBC show about midwives at Nonnatus House is taking a break after its latest series

Call The Midwife will not be back for a Christmas special this year.

The much-loved BBC period drama about midwives working in the East End is currently in its 15th series, but that is set to end on March 8 and show creator Heidi Thomas has previously confirmed the programme is then taking a break.

While it is due to return for a 16th run in the future, that will not be in January as usual, with the series on hiatus.

It has also been confirmed that its usual festive special – which is a usually a highlight of the Christmas TV schedule for viewers – will not air this December.

“We have made 15 series in 15 years – I’ve known for a couple of years that that situation won’t go on for ever,” Heidi told Radio Times.

“The sets need repair. The nuns’ habits are worn out. It takes 14 months to make every series.”

The show creator said that for two months of each year she and producer Annie Tricklebank work on two series at the same time and that the workload is “immense” and can only be sustained for “so long”.

During the Call The Midwife interlude, audiences will be treated to a wartime prequel series instead.

It commences on Christmas Day and will showcase 1940s incarnations of Sister Monica Joan, Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter), and the late Sister Evangeline, who was previously portrayed by Pam Ferris.

A film featuring the regular cast set in the Commonwealth, probably Australia, in the year 1972 is also in the pipeline.

So far it isn’t known when the 16th series of the show will air.

But Heidi told Radio Times that it will return “slightly recalibrated”. “Changes will have taken place, but the change itself is not destructive,” she said. “It’s nourishing.”

Call The Midwife – which stars Helen George as Nurse Trixie Franklin – started in 2012 and has aired 15 series set between the 1950s and 1970s, as well as several festive specials.

The current series about the midwives of Nonnatus House started in January and is set in 1971.

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Call The Midwife airs at 8pm on BBC One on Sunday March 8

US First Lady Melania Trump has presided over a UN Security Council meeting focusing on children in conflict days after dozens of children at a school in Iran were reportedly killed after Israel and the United States launched attacks.

Ulysses Jenkins, the pioneering Los Angeles-born video artist whose avant-garde compositions embodied Black experimentalism, has died. He was 79.

Jenkins’ death was confirmed by his alma mater Otis College, where he studied under renowned painter and printmaker Charles White in the late 1970s and returned as an instructor years later. The Los Angeles art and design school shared a statement from the Charles White Archive, which said, “Jenkins had a profound impact on contemporary art and media practices.”

“A trailblazing figure in Black experimental video, he was widely recognized for works that used image, sound, and cultural iconography to examine representation, race, gender, ritual, history, and power,” the statement said.

A self-proclaimed “griot,” Jenkins throughout his decades-spanning career maintained an art practice grounded in the tradition of those West African oral historians who came before him. Through archival documentaries like “The Nomadics” and surrealist murals like “1848: Bandaide,” he leveraged alternative media to challenge Eurocentric representations of Black Americans in popular culture.

He was both an artist and a storyteller who sought to “reassert the history and the culture,” he told The Times in 2022. That year, the Hammer Museum presented Jenkins’ first major retrospective, “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.”

“Early video art was about the problems with the media that we are still having today: the notions of truth,” Jenkins said. “To that extent, early video art was a construct that was anti-media … a critical analysis of the media that we were viewing every night.”

Born in 1946 to Los Angeles transplants from the South, Jenkins was ambivalent about the city, which offered his parents some refuge from the blatant systemic racism they encountered in their hometowns, but housed an entertainment industry that had long perpetuated anti-Black sentiment.

“What Hollywood represents, especially in my work, is the classic plantation mentality,” Jenkins told The Times in 1986. “Although people aren’t necessarily enslaved by it, people enslave themselves to it because they’re told how fantastic it is to help manifest these illusions for a corporate sponsor.”

Jenkins, who participated in a group of artists committed to spontaneous action called Studio Z, was naturally drawn to video art over Hollywood filmmaking. “I can address any issue and I don’t have to wait for [the studios’] big OK. I thought this was a land of freedom, and video allows me that freedom and opportunity that I can create for myself and at least feel that part of being an American,” he said.

Jenkins went on to deconstruct Hollywood’s vision of the Black diaspora in experimental video compositions including “Mass of Images,” which incorporates clips from D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist “The Birth of a Nation,” and “Two-Tone Transfer,” which depicts, in Jenkins’ words, a “dreamscape in which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of three minstrels who tell the story of the development of African American stereotypes in the American entertainment industry.”

Jenkins’ legacy is not only artistic but institutional, with the luminary having held teaching appointments at UCSD and UCI, where he co-founded the digital filmmaking minor with fellow Southern California-based artists Bruce Yonemoto and Bryan Jackson.

As artist and educator Suzanne Lacy penned in her social media tribute to Jenkins, which showed him speaking to students at REDCAT in L.A., “he has been an important part of our histories here in Southern California as video and performance artists evolved their practices.”

Iran strikes energy infrastructure across the Gulf as IRGC announces closure of Strait of Hormuz.