A small town in western France has set a new world record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Smurfs, organisers say, with more than 3,000 participants counted over the weekend.
Landerneau, a town of 16,000 in Brittany’s far west, had twice previously attempted to claim the record from Lauchringen, a German town that brought together 2,762 Smurfs in 2019.
But on Saturday, the French enthusiasts finally broke through, assembling 3,076 people clad in blue outfits, faces painted, donning white hats and singing “smurfy songs”.
The Smurfs – created by Belgian cartoonist Peyo in 1958 and known as “Schtroumpfs” in French – are tiny, human-like beings who live in the forest.
The beloved characters have since become a global franchise, spawning films, television series, advertising, video games, theme parks and toys.
“A friend encouraged me to join and I thought: ‘Why not?’” said Simone Pronost, 82, dressed as a Smurfette.
Albane Delariviere, a 20-year-old student, made the journey from Rennes, more than 200km (125 miles) away, to join the festivities.
“We thought it was a cool idea to help Landerneau out,” she said.
Landerneau’s mayor, Patrick Leclerc, also in full Smurf attire, said the event “brings people together and gives them something else to think about than the times we’re living in”.
Pascal Soun, head of the association behind the gathering, said the event “allows people to have fun and enter an imaginary world for a few hours”.
Participants were relieved to have good weather, after last year’s attempt was hampered by heavy rain that deterred many from attending.
Tens of thousands of red-clad protesters have marched through The Hague to call on the Netherlands government to do more to halt Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.
Organisers said it was the country’s biggest demonstration in two decades as rally participants pressed the Dutch government on Sunday to take action against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The crowd that gathered outside the government seat was estimated to number more than 100,000 people, according to the organisers. Police did not give an estimate.
“Sometimes I’m ashamed of the government because it doesn’t want to set any limits,” said 59-year-old teacher Jolanda Nio.
“We are calling on the Dutch government: stop political, economic and military support to Israel as long as it blocks access to aid supplies and while it is guilty of genocide, war crimes and structural human rights violations in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories,” said Marjon Rozema of Amnesty International.
Israel’s army announced “extensive ground operations” on Sunday as part of its newly expanded campaign in the Gaza Strip. Rescuers reported dozens killed in a wave of Israeli attacks.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 53,339 people and wounded 121,034, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
The enclave’s Government Media Office updated the death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, and about 250 were taken captive.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague is hearing a case brought by South Africa, arguing that the Gaza war breached the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, an accusation Israel has strongly denied.
Tens of thousands of people have rallied across the world in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and to mark the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Jewish militias, remembered as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
The Nakba resulted in the permanent mass displacement of Palestinians after the creation of Israel in 1948. Activists say that history is repeating itself today in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
In Stockholm, thousands assembled at Odenplan Square, responding to calls from various civil society organisations to protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza. Participants waved Palestinian flags, displayed photographs of children killed, and carried banners stating: “Stop the Zionist regime’s genocide in Palestine”.
Many demonstrators bore placards listing the names of civilians killed in Gaza, seeking to highlight the ongoing massacre.
Meanwhile, in London, United Kingdom, hundreds of thousands marched towards Downing Street, demanding an end to what they described as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, 77 years on from the Nakba. Protesters, some dressed in keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags, chanted slogans such as “Stop the genocide in Gaza”, “Free Palestine”, and “Israel is a terror state”.
The demonstrators denounced the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, accusing it of deliberately starving more than two million Palestinians, and criticised the UK government for its political and military backing of Israel, alleging complicity in the humanitarian crisis.
In Berlin, Germany, people gathered at Potsdamer Platz to protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza. Demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and held signs reading: “Your silence is complicity” and “You cannot kill us all”. Women in traditional dress carrying Nakba-themed visuals were also present.
The event took place amid heavy security measures, with at least three people reportedly detained.
A solidarity march was held in Athens, Greece, where protesters, adorned in keffiyehs and carrying Palestinian flags, marched first to the embassies of the United States and Israel.
Protests have erupted after hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past few days as Israel intensified its attacks, with the announcement of a new ground offensive.
Globally, May 15 was observed as the 77th anniversary of the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes following the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The Israeli military has killed 53,272 Palestinians and injured 120,673 since it launched an offensive on October 7, 2023, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The Government Media Office updated the death toll to more than 61,700, noting that thousands still missing beneath the rubble are presumed dead.
I wasn’t expecting a painting of a naked clown to greet me when I FaceTimed Demetri Martin on a Monday afternoon in May. After the longest two seconds of my life, the comedian appeared in front of the camera with an unassuming smile.
For the past few months, Martin has been toiling away in the studio shed designed by his wife, interior designer Rachael Beame Martin, in the backyard of their Beverly Glen home. Lush greenery peeks through the windows above a lattice he constructed to mount canvases of various sizes. His first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings is just days away and he has some finishing touches to make.
Visual art is not new to Martin, a wiz at one-liners who incorporates drawings in his stand-up.
“The cool thing about a drawing is I can share something personal and I can use a graphic to illustrate it more specifically,” he says in “Demetri Deconstructed,” his 2024 Netflix special. In one graph from the special, he plots the inverse relationship between the amount of “past” and “future” time across an individual’s lifespan. The point where “past” and “future” meet is the mid-life existential crisis.
There is a synergy between Martin’s jokes and his sketches, which are more akin to doodles than drawings. Their humor lies in their pared-down specificity. They “make you ponder something on the absurdity-of-life level, which I guess is comedy,” says Martin’s close friend and musician Jack Johnson.
“I brought visual art into my stand-up comedy,” says Demetri Martin. “Can I bring comedy into the visual art world?”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
With his love of joke crafting, Martin says he represents the comedy old guard as stand-up has become heavily autobiographical in today’s internet age.
“Specifically, it’s jokes that have always attracted me when we’re talking about the comedy world,” Martin says of his aversion to storytelling. “Can you do a joke in 12 words? Can you get an idea across? How much can you take away and it still lands with people?”
“Acute Angles,” Martin’s solo exhibition running Sunday to May 31, takes his obsession with constraint a step further. The experiment: Can you communicate jokes visually without any words?
“I brought visual art into my stand-up comedy,” says Martin, who worked on paintings for two-plus years before he figured he had enough material to fill a gallery. “Can I bring comedy into the visual art world?”
“Acute Angles” — he says the title references the shape of his nose — features large-scale paintings with a unifying color palette of bright red, sky blue and medium gray, in addition to 30 smaller drawings. The paintings depict implausible scenarios: What if the grim reaper slipped on a banana on his way to kill you? What if Superman ripped his underpants on his quest to save you?
The show is a collaboration with his wife, whom he adoringly describes as the muscles of the operation. The two secured a month-long lease of an abandoned yoga studio tucked behind a California Pizza Kitchen in Brentwood. Using her design skills — they met in New York City when she was attending Parsons School of Design and he was pursing comedy — Beame Martin led a rebuild of the studio-turned-gallery.
When Martin’s publicist called to ask if the gallery had a name, the couple turned to Google. They eventually came up with “Laconic Gallery,” for Laconia, Greece, where Martin traces his roots, and because the word laconic perfectly describes Martin’s ethos: marked by the use of few words.
Demetri Martin describes his wife, Rachael Beame Martin, as the muscles of the operation.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
On the day of our interview, Martin is completing the last of 12 paintings for the show and is puzzled why the paint appears differently on the canvas than in the can. He’s trying hard to ensure the color of the naked clown’s pubic hair matches his hair.
The relationship between the viewer and the art is both exciting and scary to Martin. When taking a comedy show on the road, you more or less know your jokes will land, he says. With an art show, there’s more of a vacuum between him and the audience, yet the conceit remains: the show is meant to be funny.
But whether viewers laugh while visiting the art exhibition almost doesn’t matter. For Martin, the reward has been the process of creation — the meditative zone he sinks into, indie rock oozing from his CD player, as he envisions and re-envisions the work. (Many of the paintings in the show are derived from old sketches.)
The show also represents Martin’s re-emergence from his own mid-life existential crisis. At 51, he is older than his dad was when he died and about the same age as his late mom, when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. “So now, is this like bonus time for me?” he started to ask himself in his late 40s.
In some ways, Martin has always been a tortured artist. After graduating from Yale, he attended NYU Law only to drop out after the second year. But New York City is also where he found himself, spending late nights at the Comedy Cellar and the Boston Comedy Club. His days were spent visiting the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Daydreaming his way through the galleries, jotting jokes in his notepad, is when he first gained an appreciation for the arts.
“He’s not without cynicism once you know him, but where comics so often lead with cynicism, he has this wide-eyed openness, and I think that’s a thread that pulls through all of his work,” says comedian and fellow Comedy Central alum Sarah Silverman.
Demetri Martin’s first solo art exhibition is a collaboration with his wife, Rachael Beame Martin.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Now, Martin is a father to an 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son — the same age he was when manning his Greek family’s shish kebab stand on the Jersey Shore. His self-described anger at seeing the world his kids are growing up in, namely their peers’ obsessions with cell phones, seeps into his paintings and drawings. But ultimately, being a father has irrevocably improved Martin’s perspective on life.
“I think sometimes resignation is also acceptance,” he says, on his new appreciation of midlife. “You’re still motivated, but maybe not in the same way. … You still want to make things, but maybe it doesn’t matter as much, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. So that’s where I feel like I’m at, where I’m saying, ‘You know what, I’m grateful.’ I understand how lucky I’ve been now.”
He’s not quite done with touring but “Acute Angles” represents a potential escape. If his comedy can travel without him, if he can make money while foregoing lonely nights on the road, he can prioritize more important moments, like playing catch with his son after school. After all, his kids aren’t at the age yet where they hate him — a joke his kids don’t like.
Still, Martin’s art-making mirrors his joke-writing. It’s a numbers game, meticulously filling notebooks in handwriting Silverman describes as “tiny letters all perfectly the same size,” then revisiting and sharpening material until the joke emerges, like a vision.
“It’s really a privilege to have the kind of career where I can try something like this,” Martin says. “I don’t take that for granted anymore.”
Thousands of Palestinians have been ordered by the Israeli forces to flee parts of northern Gaza as indiscriminate air strikes have killed at least 115 people in the territory.
Palestinians in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya area fled their homes with essential belongings on Friday, after intense Israeli air strikes hit the area.
More than 19,000 Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza since Thursday afternoon, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). “Many with nothing but the clothes on their backs,” the organisation said in a post on X. “Nowhere is safe in Gaza.”
Nearly all of Gaza’s population has been displaced at some point during the genocide, with several forced to flee many times over. Israel has increasingly issued forced displacement orders as it escalates its attacks in the enclave.
In a statement in Arabic on Saturday, the Israeli military said it has launched the “initial stages” of what it calls Operation Gideon’s Chariots, a new offensive for “the expansion of the battle in the Gaza Strip, with the goal of achieving all the war’s objectives, including the release of the abducted and the defeat of Hamas”.
A separate statement in English said the army was “mobilising troops to achieve operational control in areas of the Gaza Strip”.
Israel has killed at least 115 Palestinians in Gaza since dawn on Friday as it intensifies bombardment of the enclave amid widespread forced starvation. More than 100 other Palestinians were killed on Thursday in similar attacks.
Since October 2024, Israel has killed at least 53,119 Palestinians and wounded 120,214 others, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The enclave’s Government Media Office updated the death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
Palestinians held marches in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah to commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, of their mass dispossession during the creation of Israel in 1948.
More than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 2023 and an aid blockade threatens famine, while Israeli leaders continue to express a desire to empty the territory of Palestinians.
In the West Bank, too, occupied since 1967, Israeli forces have displaced tens of thousands from refugee camps as part of a major military operation.
This year marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, during which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their lands after Israel declared itself an independent state in the territory.
In Ramallah city, Palestinian flags and black ones branded “return” flew at road intersections on Wednesday, while schoolchildren were bussed into the city centre to take part in the weeklong commemoration.
At one event, young boys wearing Palestinian kuffiyeh scarves waved flags and carried a giant replica key, a symbol of the lost homes in what is now Israel that families hope to return to.
No events were planned in Gaza, where more than 19 months of war and Israeli bombardment have left residents destitute and displaced.
Moamen al-Sherbini, a resident of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, told the AFP news agency that he felt history was repeating itself.
“Our lives here in Gaza have become one long Nakba, losing loved ones, our homes destroyed, our livelihoods gone.”
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once during Israel’s war.
In early May, Israel’s security cabinet approved plans for an expanded military offensive in Gaza, aimed at the “conquest” of the territory while displacing its people en masse, drawing international condemnation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his government is working to find third countries to take in Gaza’s population, months after United States President Donald Trump suggested they be expelled and the territory redeveloped as a holiday destination.
“Nakba Day is no longer just a memory – it’s a daily reality we live in Gaza,” said 36-year-old Malak Radwan, speaking from Nuseirat in the centre of the enclave.
“This is a miserable day in the lives of Palestinian refugees,” said 52-year-old Nael Nakhleh in Ramallah, whose family comes from the village of al-Majdal near Jaffa in what is now Israel.
Palestinian refugees maintain their demand to return to the villages and cities in current-day Israel that they or their relatives were forced to leave in 1948. The “right of return” remains a core issue in the long-stalled negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
Celebrations broke out across Syria after President Donald Trump said the United States would lift sanctions on the country.
The Syrian foreign ministry on Tuesday welcomed Trump’s announcement, calling it a “pivotal turning point for the Syrian people, as we seek to emerge from a long and painful chapter of war”.
“The removal of those sanctions offers a vital opportunity for Syria to pursue stability, self-sufficiency, and meaningful national reconstruction, led by and for the Syrian people,” it said in a statement.
In a speech given in Riyadh, the US president said he “will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness”.
US sanctions have isolated Syria from the global financial system and imposed a range of economic restrictions on the government over more than a decade of war in the country.
The lingering sanctions have widely been seen as a major obstacle to Syria’s economic recovery and post-war reconstruction.
Syrians met the news with joy and celebration, with dozens of men, women and children gathering in Damascus’s Umayyad Square. They blasted music while others drove by in their cars, waving Syrian flags.
“My joy is great, this decision will definitely affect the entire country positively. Construction will return, the displaced will return and prices will go down,” said Huda Qassar, a 33-year-old English language teacher, celebrating with her compatriots.
In the northern province of Idlib, Bassam al-Ahmed, 39, said he was very happy about the announcement.
“It is the right of the Syrian people, after 14 years of war and 50 years of the Assads’ oppression, to live through stability and safety,” he said.
Mazloum Abdi, also known as Mazloum Kobani, the leader of the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, welcomed the decision, saying he hopes it “will be invested in supporting stability and reconstruction, ensuring a better future for all Syrians”.
