Heights

While almost half of Bournemouth’s first team left during the summer, Semenyo was linked with moves to Manchester United, Liverpool and Tottenham.

But instead he signed a five-year deal back on 1 July.

And that has proved to be fantastic business for the Cherries for he is one of the form players in the Premier League right now.

Last season, the 25-year-old Ghana forward hit double figures for the first time in his career – 11 goals in the league, 13 in all competitions.

This season he has scored six times in his opening seven Premier League games and assisted three more.

Semenyo was asked after the game by the BBC if this was the best form of his life.

“Yeah, I’d like to think so,” he said. “I thank God massively. He’s played a massive part in my life and I’m just reaping the rewards now. So yeah, I thank him always.”

There will be many clubs wishing they had taken the gamble on him before.

Semenyo qualifies for Ghana through his father, but he is from London. He was rejected by Arsenal, Spurs and Millwall as a youngster before ending up in a West Country academy run by former Leeds and Forest Green manager Dave Hockaday.

Bristol City signed him in 2017 but he needed loan spells at Bath, Newport and Sunderland before breaking into the Robins first team in 2020-21.

In January 2023, he made the £10m move to Bournemouth – and he has been improving ever since.

“I think he is a player with confidence,” said boss Andoni Iraola.

“It has been growing with him. He has played in other divisions, earning his way into the Premier League. He is very fundamental for us.”

His numbers are through the roof now. He is first in the Premier League for duels won, first for possession won in the final third, second for sprints and top five for dribbles. Plus all those goals of course.

Team-mate Kluivert said: “He is incredible. He shows it every game now. He is just world class.”

The beautiful village that has been frozen in time, with tourists saying it’s like stepping into another era

Haworth has remained untouched by time as visitors claim it’s “like stepping into another era”. This charming village sits tucked away in the stunning Yorkshire countryside, formerly the residence of the renowned Brontë sisters, with the nearby moor inspiring Wuthering Heights.

The siblings’ old family residence has been transformed into a museum, drawing literary enthusiasts from far and wide. The village has certainly earned its reputation, with independent bookstore Wave of Nostalgia being crowned the finest in all of northern England by The Bookseller.

Boasting its cobbled Main Street, famous parsonage and sweeping moorland, this Airedale settlement retains numerous historical features that remain completely preserved, reports the Express.

Positioned adjacent to the Yorkshire Dales, it enjoys spectacular rural landscapes and undulating hillsides.

Visitors to the museum can glimpse a precious miniature manuscript penned by Charlotte Brontë, which dates back to December 1829.

Leeds lies just a brief journey away, providing a completely contrasting atmosphere to the tranquil village whilst delivering abundant retail and dining opportunities.

The ancient city of York also sits nearby, displaying its famous cobblestone lanes and classic English design.

Though Haworth itself remains compact, the settlement boasts a legendary Main Street lined with numerous independent retailers and coffee houses.

Mrs Beighton’s Sweet Shop is reportedly essential viewing, stocking more than 500 classic British confections to sample.

Haworth Wholefoods provides an unusual grocery experience for weekly shopping, featuring regional produce and organic fare. H and L Fashions, a quaint boutique specialising in French and Italian designs, caters to both men and women, keeping the vintage theme alive.

The Cabinet of Curiosities offers a museum-like shopping experience, with its rich mahogany interior and glass globes transporting customers back in time.

For those keen on exploring Yorkshire, Haworth provides self-catering accommodation options, as well as cosy B&Bs.

The first trailer for the new Wuthering Heights movie adaptation has been released and it’s clear that Emerald Fennell’s take on the classic novel is set to be a very provocative one

Emily Bronte fans have been left divided as the first look at the latest Wuthering Heights movie adaptation has been revealed. The iconic dark romance is set to get the Hollywood treatment with Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in the leading roles.

Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s hotly anticipated movie adaptation set on the lonesome Yorkshire Moors has been given a saucy makeover, with many fearing it is a far cry from the classic book. The opening scene sees a man ejaculates while being executed, with other risqué scenes teased.

In the new trailer, Charli xcx‘s hit Everything Is Romantic acts as a soundtrack as viewers are introduced to Margot and Jacob as Catherine and Heathcliff.

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Those who have already seen the full movie are said to have described Oscar-nominated Fennel’s take on Bronte’s classic novel as “aggressively provocative”, with mixed reviews coming out of advanced screenings.

And the first trailer has certainly sparked some conflicting opinions from social media commentators too. The teaser kicks off with a sweeping shot of a grand estate nestled in the West Yorkshire moors, followed by a stunning close-up of Margot. Suddenly, we’re treated to an intimate shot of two female hands kneading bread.

What follows is a montage of more traditional images interspersed with provocative shots: a bare, glistening back; a shirtless Jacob handling hay in a stable; more bread kneading; fingers tracing through egg yolks; Margot’s Catherine slipping her fingers into Jacob’s mouth; a woman having horse tack placed on her face; and, naturally, a finger probing the mouth of a fish.

“It’s worse than you could ever imagine,” one Twitter (X) user penned in reaction to the trailer going live. “This looks and feels garish & tacky as sh** lmao god bless,” another added as a third fumed: “someone take away emerald fennell’s directing license i’m so serious.”

But some are excited to see the latest adapation of Wuthering Heights when it lands in cinemas on Valentine’s Day next year. “It looks stunning and erotic. (In the best way),” one fan quipped, as another gushed: “Margot Robbie + Jacob Elordi in a gothic Valentine’s release? That’s gonna pack theaters.”

At the first test screening for the film last month, one viewer describe Fennell’s take as “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive”. Following the screening, it was reported that the movie opens with a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”. The throng of people watching the execution then react orgiastically, and a nun “fondles the corpse’s visible erection”.

Speaking about the upcoming movie earlier this year, Jacob gushed: “The performances from everyone – it’s breathtaking,” he said. “It’s an incredible romance. It’s a true epic. It’s visually beautiful. The script is beautiful. The costumes are incredible.”

Jacob being cast as Heathcliff initially sparked some controversary, due to the character being described as hating dark skin in Bronte’s book. Casting director, Karmel Cochrane, defended the decision to place a white man in the role earlier this year.

“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” she said. “But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”

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Aug. 17 (UPI) — A mass shooting at a Brooklyn, N.Y., nightclub left three people dead and nine others hospitalized, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday.

The shooting happened at the Taste of the City lounge in the Crown Heights neighborhood around 3:30 a.m. on Sunday. Three men, ages 19, 27 and 35, died from gunshot wounds, the youngest at the scene. Those injured ranged in age from 19 to 61.

In a news conference about the shooting, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said nine people were being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

She said the shooting appears to be gang related. There were up to four shooters involved, though no arrests were made as of midday Sunday.

Police recovered one firearm nearby and are investigating whether it was involved in the shooting. Tisch said 42 shell casings from 9 mm and 45-caliber firearms were recovered from the scene of the shooting.

Adams called on the public to come forward with information about the shooting.

“If you were inside the club, if you heard individuals talking about shooting, if you witnessed something fleeting the location, every piece of information would allow us to put the puzzle together to solve this crime,” he said.

Taylor Swift will enter her latest era in a matter of months.

The ubiquitous “Shake It Off” pop star announced her upcoming album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” would drop Oct. 3 as she made her podcasting debut Wednesday on “New Heights,” co-hosted by her NFL star boyfriend Travis Kelce and his retired football pro brother, Jason Kelce. The Grammy winner also unveiled the album’s tracklist, which touts a finale featuring Sabrina Carpenter.

“It was something I was working on while I was in Europe on the Eras tour,” she explained to the Kelce brothers. “I was physically exhausted at this point on the tour, but I was so mentally stimulated and so excited to be creating.”

Swift revealed her 12th album was imminent earlier this week in a teaser promoting the latest “New Heights” episode. In the clip, she pulls a blurred-out record out of a briefcase decorated simply with her initials.

“The Life of a Showgirl” will be her second record in two years — following last year’s “The Tortured Poets Department” — and her first release since reacquiring the rights to her early recordings in May.

That was a move that “changed my life,” she said Wednesday.

Love Island star Meg has found herself embroiled in a bitter feud with Malisha after the bombshell from Broxbourne waltzed into the villa on Friday with her eyes firmly set on Meg’s man

The drama is set to continue in the Love Island villa tonight as things get heated again between Meg and Malisha in the garden and as Alima comforts Malisha in the dressing room.

After hearing her side, Alima has some thoughts on the situation, heading out to the kitchen to tell Meg and the group: “I’m not gonna lie, that wasn’t nice to see both of you, all the shouting…let’s be nice to people.” Meg then says: “I said [to Malisha] I don’t want you to feel like this, you’re now mugging me off and being disrespectful – I don’t want to argue with her.”

Sharing her thoughts on the situation, Shakira adds: “I don’t think she [Malisha] was being disrespectful going to the Hideaway.” To which Meg hits back: “That’s your opinion, not mine.”

Meanwhile that evening, Toni and Conor debrief about where they stand and more importantly where he stands with new bombshell Emily. Toni tells him: “I think you know I have eyes for you, out of the three girls that came in last night, she’s [Emily] obviously a sweetheart. I think her and I are very different. Are you looking for a sweet, mild girl or someone like me?”

The next day, Meg is keen to bury the hatchet and pulls Malisha for another chat. Meg says: “Third time lucky, we’re gonna get it right this time…”

It comes as Love Island viewers believe they have rumbled Meg’s game plan amid the high tensions in the villa. Things have been heating up in the Love Island villa thanks to the arrival of the three bombshells on Friday night.

The three bombshells include 24-year-old teaching assistant Malisha from Broxbourne, Commercial Banking Executive Yasmin, 24, and Insurance Development Executive Emily, 24, from Aberdeen.

The boys left the villa earlier in the day for drinks, but what they didn’t know was that the girls would be watching their every move on a giant TV back in the main villa. Meg particularly struggled watching the boys chat to the girls, with her even being branded “mean”.

She hit out at the bombshells and threw insults at them, including going as far as calling one of them a “b***h.” Her behaviour didn’t go unnoticed by fans at home as they believed they cracked why she was acting in that way.

One fan shared: “Meg doesn’t fancy him, she’s just worried about her place in the villa.” Another added: “Meg cannot convince me that she is into Dejon. He is just an easy option at the moment.”

“Like Meg your doing all this huffing and puffing for a guy you probably don’t even really like,” shared another. Someone else quipped: “meg isn’t acting like this because she likes dejon SOOO much btw, she doesn’t wanna get embarrassed and she doesn’t wanna get dumped, i know her game.”

Shortly after they all established where they stood in their relationship, three new bombshells entered and caused a stir for the girls watching.

They then headed off on one-on-one dates with three of the boys as the original girls watched on. Tensions rose once again when they boys and the bombshells returned to the villa where they discovered they had been watched the whole time.

And it looks like tensions are only going to continue to grow in the villa from here on out….

LOVE ISLAND CONTINUES TONIGHT AT 9PM ON ITV2 AND ITVX.

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In 2022, Kyra Davis Lurie heard a story on KCRW’s “Curbed Los Angeles” about the residents of South L.A.’s West Adams Heights, nicknamed Sugar Hill after a community of wealthy Black Harlemites. Learning about the sumptuous soirees Academy Award-winning actor Hattie McDaniel hosted in her Sugar Hill mansion, Lurie realized there was a hidden Black history waiting for her to unearth. But how she created the enthralling historical novel “The Great Mann” is a story that owes as much to Lurie’s ability to reinvent herself as it does to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the iconic 20th century critique of the American dream, which provided a touchstone for the novel.

Lurie, 52, grew up in Santa Cruz, far from the neighborhood where McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters and other striving Black actors and business pioneers depicted in “The Great Mann” lived. While she visited family regularly in L.A., Lurie stayed up north, where she penned the light-hearted 2005 book “Sex, Murder and a Double Latte.” She quickly followed it with two more mysteries. Encouraged by her success, Lurie struck out for L.A. to pursue her dream of getting into a TV writers room. The 2007 writers’ strike deferred that goal, so Lurie pivoted to write three erotic novels which, she reveals, were “critiques of capitalism wrapped in a romance novel.”

By the time she heard about Sugar Hill and its famous inhabitants, Lurie was ready to take on a more nuanced challenge. But many literary agents weren’t receptive to her change of genre. “It was as if Marlon James had gone from writing comic books to ‘A [Brief] History of Seven Killings,’” she says, name-checking the famous Jamaican writer and his Man Booker Prize-winning novel. But as Lurie continued researching the neighborhood and its history, she knew she had to tell its story, even if using “The Great Gatsby” as her North Star proved problematic.

“I’m a huge Fitzgerald fan,” Lurie says, “even though there was a line in that book that always bothered me.” She’s referring to Nick Carraway’s reference to “two bucks and a girl” upon seeing three wealthy Black people passing by in a white-chauffeured limousine. “While it was probably used to get a laugh in 1925, it was demeaning,” Lurie says of the scene. “In the wake of the Red Summer of 1919 [when a record number of race riots and lynchings of Black Americans occurred in the U.S.] and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Fitzgerald’s language says a lot about America’s cultural climate at the time.”

Was it subversive to use Fitzerald’s most famous novel to frame the story of a vibrant Black enclave whose prosperity rivaled that of Jay Gatsby and his ilk? Absolutely, Lurie says, adding, “Through a Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ I tried to marry a family’s story with a little-known part of L.A. history.”

The family story is told through the lens of Charlie Trammell III, a World War II veteran emotionally scarred by the violence he witnessed on the battlefield and at home in Jim Crow Virginia. Charlie arrives in L.A. looking for a fresh start and to reconnect with his cousin Margie, with whom he shares pivotal childhood experiences. But Margie, who now goes by the more exotic Marguerite, has shaken off the past and married Terrance Lewis, a vice president at Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. The Lewises live with their son in Sugar Hill, along with McDaniel, Beavers and Norman O. Houston, the real-life co-founder and president of Golden State Mutual.

Soon Charlie is swept into the world of L.A.’s wealthy Black elite, a mix of real Angelenos like John and Vada Somerville, pioneering Black dentists and founders of Central Avenue’s famed Dunbar Hotel; singers-actors Waters and Lena Horne; and fictional characters including James Mann, the mysterious Black businessman recently arrived in Sugar Hill who hosts lavish parties unlike anything Charlie’s ever seen: “The air is flavored with flowery perfumes and earthy cigars. All around me diamonds glitter from brown earlobes, gold watches flash against brown wrists. The only things white are the walls.”

Mann befriends Charlie, treating the recently discharged veteran to his first hand-tailored suit and fine wine, but soon embroils him in his quest to reunite with Marguerite, the love of his life since the two met some 10 years before when they both lived in the South.

“Through a Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ I tried to marry a family’s story with a little-known part of L.A. history,” Kyra Davis Lurie said.

(Yvette Roman Photography)

Like Fitzgerald’s classic juxtaposition of West Egg and East Egg in “Gatsby,” “The Great Mann” is about new money versus old — interlopers like Mann and the entertainers versus businesspeople like Houston and the Somervilles. But Lurie “tried not to invent flaws” in her historical figures by doing her homework, sourcing accounts in Black newspapers, biographies and even letters between Houston and NAACP leader Walter White to depict these frictions.

“The Great Mann” is also about people reinventing themselves amid the realities and contradictions of the time. Like Black actors who played maids but employed Black “help” in real life. Or the controversy over the stereotypically demeaning roles Black actors depicted. Chief among them was Delilah Johnson, the subservient Black maid portrayed by Beavers in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” It’s a debate that’s introduced in “The Great Mann” when Marguerite and Terrance tell Charlie that Beavers’ home, where he will be staying and which is much grander than theirs, is paid for “with Black shame.” Also addressed in the novel are touchier subjects like White’s advocacy for the lighter-skinned Horne to get roles over her darker-skinned colleagues like McDaniel or Beavers.

But the engine that fires up the plot of “The Great Mann,” and which sets it apart from “Gatsby,” is the battle Black creatives and business owners faced to hold onto their properties. A clause placed in thousands of L.A. property deeds in 1902 restricted housing covenants at the time West Adams Heights and many other L.A. County communities were developed, prohibiting homes from being sold to anyone “other than the white or Caucasian race.” But some white sellers sold property to Black buyers anyway, who then had to fight white groups — like the West Adams Heights Improvement Assn. — to prevent eviction from their own homes.

To say how Sugar Hill’s Black residents fared in court would spoil the enjoyment of this suspenseful tale, which has put Lurie on a new path in writing historical fiction. She has another project percolating, but for now, she’s just grateful to have found her niche. “It’s been a journey,” she says of the twists and turns of her writing life, “but writing about historical Black lives feels like home to me, what I was meant to do.”

Lurie will be discussing “The Great Mann” at Vroman’s Bookstore at 7 p.m. June 10; Diesel, a Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. June 11; and Chevalier’s Books at 6:30 p.m. June 19.