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SHE’S one of the biggest stars in the world, but Kylie Minogue is dreaming of the simple life this Christmas.

Sitting down with Bizarre as she counts down to the big day, the I Should Be So Lucky singer reveals there are no diamonds on her festive wishlist.

Instead, the singer dreams of being invited to a good old-fashioned office Christmas party.

Her new festive album, Kylie Christmas (Fully Wrapped) — out on Friday — even has a track dedicated to the often messy annual do.

On the innuendo-filled song, Office Party, a sultry Kylie can be heard saying: “You know, I’ve never really been to one, but I hear they are lots of fun. So tell me, can we go to one?”

When Bizarre’s Jack questions if Kylie has really never been to an office do via her record label, or if it’s simply artistic licence to make a good song, the chart-topper laughs: “I’ve not! It’s coming from my perspective as I wrote it.

“We’ve had office parties but it’s backstage somewhere. I’ve never worked in an office so it’s kind of like a fantasy for me.”

After we joke that she’s really glamourising the mundane nine-to-five that most people endure, Kylie giggles: “I appreciate it’s the day-to-day but it’s kind of, like, everything changes at the office party.

“One of the countries we went to on the Tension Tour, the work visa magically puts everyone in a suit. It was hilarious to us but that planted a seed in my mind that for our party, we need to all rock up in grey suits.”

Fair enough, we hear you loud and clear, Kylie.

Seeing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and way to win some serious brownie points at work, Jack quickly invited Kylie to our own bash.

Sadly she had to politely decline as she will be back home in Australia by the time The Sun kicks off the celebrations.

But Jack promised to do a rendition of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head on the karaoke in her honour.

It might be just as well she’ll miss the do if previous years’ excesses are anything to go by.

This time, Jack has been put on a four-drink rule, while Amir from the newsdesk has never truly recovered from 2023’s party.

Also on Kylie’s new album is XMAS — the record’s lead single, which is a collaboration with Amazon Music.

Kylie tells us the track, inspired by the Village People’s 1978 hit YMCA, has been a decade in the making.

She explains: “The song comes from 2015. I was at Soho House in Berlin, it was summer on the terrace and we’d just done the first Christmas album. We’d had a couple of glasses of wine — it wasn’t Kylie Wines back then — and it came to us like YMCA but XMAS. I’ve been sitting on the chorus for ten years.”

The song comes from 2015. I was at Soho House in Berlin, it was summer on the terrace and we’d just done the first Christmas album

Kylie Minogue

The video for the single will be out later this month and sees Kylie perform the famous flying dance move from 1987 film, Dirty Dancing.

Despite being a dancing pro, Kylie feared she would never be able to pull off the move.

She admits: “I was a bit scared as I’ve never done it before. It was a fantasy moment. I was told not to overthink it.

“We did a couple of practices before we did the main one. The thing is, you just need to trust the other person.

“The first one I got up, but I overshot it. The second was fine. The third one was good. The bruises were worth it the next day,” she laughs.

As for her own Christmas plans, Kylie will see in the big day back home in Australia.

Worked relentlessly

She says: “I will probably be tucked away, planning a BBQ. I love a cold Christmas, though. You will see on Fully Wrapped, I am very influenced by a British Christmas.

“I think it can be too hot and we are doing other things in Australia. We celebrate, but it’s different here. Any Aussie will tell you that.”

Next year will see Kylie step back from the spotlight, having worked relentlessly for two years, racking up two UK No1 albums and a 66-date world tour.

But that doesn’t mean she’s putting her feet up.

I will probably be tucked away, planning a BBQ. I love a cold Christmas, though. You will see on Fully Wrapped, I am very influenced by a British Christmas

Kylie Minogue

Kylie says: “It feels like I haven’t stopped. It’s been a gigantic year but I imagine I will be making music just for the love of it and maybe banking some things.

“I could happily be in the studio most of my time. I love it. I find it just gets richer and more satisfying.

“Doing the Christmas album in my breaks of the Tension Tour was maybe not so wise, but I love it.”

Keen not to get fans’ hopes up for a new Kylie record in 2026, she adds: “I don’t know about releasing. I think I should just do the background work . . .  maybe.”

Honestly Kylie, we adore your work ethic and the amount of music you’ve given us recently, but if you want to put your feet up when you’re back in Oz, we totally understand.

XMAS ON HIGH IN No1 RACE

KYLIE will be Spinning Around in excitement now her festive single XMAS, above, has officially entered the race for Christmas No 1.

Last night, the Official Charts revealed the track has jumped 55 places in the midweek charts – leaping from 64 to nine.

Insisting she’s playing down any idea she could nab the top spot, Kylie said: “I’m not counting on it.

“It would be crazy but that’s definitely parked to one side for me.

“I am just happy that ten years have passed since my last Christmas album and we are all here still going.”

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KYLIE fans looking for early Christmas presents are in luck.

A Kylie pop-up shop is coming to London’s Battersea Power Station this Friday.

Open all weekend, it will offer gifts such as signed test pressings and limited-edition vinyl.

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I SHOULD BE SO PLUCKY  

KYLIE has done things in her career the rest of us can only dream of.
But she’s never cooked a turkey.

The singer admits she leaves the cooking to sister Dannii and brother Brendan.

She said: “I’ve never cooked a turkey, though I have roasted other things. But I’m not a natural. It’s not my natural habitat, no.”

She adds: “My brother and sister are very present in the kitchen.

“I’m there, I’m sous chef and I’m available for anything that needs doing.

“But everyone’s families are like that, aren’t they? You know your place, don’t rock the system, don’t rock the boat. We all just want to get through Christmas.”

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Federal Aviation Administration says airlines can resume normal schedules from Monday.

Flights in the United States are set to return to normal after the country’s aviation authority announced an end to restrictions introduced during the government shutdown.

Airlines will be able to return to their normal schedules from 6am Eastern Time (11:00 GMT) on Monday after the lifting of an emergency order reducing the number of flights, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement on Sunday.

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The FAA ordered reductions in flights at 40 major airports during the shutdown to ensure safety amid reports of air traffic controllers exhibiting fatigue and refusing to turn up for work.

The restrictions resulted in the cancellations of thousands of flights and delays to countless more.

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a bill to resume government funding and end the shutdown, bringing to an end a six-week standoff between Republicans and Democrats.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the lifting of the order reflected a “steady decline in staffing concerns.”

Staffing triggers, which refer to instances where the number of available air traffic controllers falls below safe levels, dropped from 81 on November 8 to six on Friday, eight on Saturday and just one on Sunday, according to the aviation authority.

Under the restrictions, airlines were ordered to reduce flights by 4 percent by November 7 and 6 percent by November 10.

Officials on Friday scaled back the restrictions to 3 percent, pointing to improving staffing levels following the end of the government shutdown.

In its statement on Sunday, the FAA said it was also “reviewing and assessing enforcement options” amid reports of airlines not complying with the emergency order in recent days.

Just 149 flights were cancelled on Sunday, according to flight tracking website FlightAware, well below the 3 percent cut mandated by the FAA.

NEW YORK — No one could possibly be working harder right now on Broadway than Kristin Chenoweth, who is bearing the weight of a McMansion musical on her diminutive frame and making it seem like she’s hoisting nothing heavier than a few overstuffed Hermes, Prada and Chanel shopping bags.

A trouper’s trouper, Chenoweth has reunited with her “Wicked” compatriot Stephen Schwartz, who has written the score for “The Queen of Versailles.” The show, which had its Broadway opening at the St. James Theatre on Sunday, is an adaptation of Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about a family building one of the largest private homes in America in a style that blends Louis XIV with Las Vegas.

When the Great Recession of 2008 crashes the party, the Florida couple who are never satisfied despite having everything find themselves scrounging to make the mortgage payments for this unfinished (and possibly unfinishable) Orlando colossus. Not even the banks know what to do with this gargantuan white elephant.

The first half of the musical traces Jackie’s rise from a hardworking upstate New York hick to a Florida beauty pageant winner who escaped an abusive relationship with her baby daughter. Her dream of nabbing a wealthy husband comes true after she meets David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham, in vivid vulgarian resort mogul mode). He’s decades older than her but as rich as Croesus, having proudly transformed himself into the “Timeshare King.”

With David funding her every whim, Jackie discovers the joys of consumerism as her family expands along with her credit line. David adopts her first-born, Victoria (Nina White), a sulky adolescent who doesn’t appreciate her mother’s lavish ways. And the couple proceed to have six more children together before adopting Jackie’s niece, Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins), a Dickensian waif who shows up with all her belongings stuffed into plastic bags.

The musical’s book, written by Lindsey Ferrentino (whose plays included the raw veteran recovery story “Ugly Lies the Bone”) deals only with Victoria and Jonquil, leaving the other kids to our imagination along with most of the pets that suffer the seesaw of lavish attention and thoughtless neglect that is the Siegel family way.

Jackie didn’t set out to build such a ludicrously gigantic residence. As she explains in the number “Because We Can,” “We just want the home of our dreams/And the house we’re in now,/Although it’s sweet,/It’s only like 26,000 square feet,/So we’re just bursting at the seams.”

This version of “The Queen of Versailles,” making the visual most of settings by scenic and video designer Dane Laffrey, that can make Mar-a-Lago seem understated, embraces the sociological fable aspect of the tale. To drive home the political point, the musical begins at the court of Louis XIV and returns to France near the end of the show after the French Revolution has bloodied up the guillotine with the powdered heads of callous aristocrats.

Jackie sees herself as a modern-day Marie Antoinette, but instead of saying “Let them eat cake” she has her driver bring back enough McDonald’s to feed an entire film crew. Chenoweth, who is as gleaming as a holiday ornament on Liberace’s Christmas tree, arrives at a canny balance of quixotic generosity and parvenu carelessness in her portrayal of a woman she refuses to lampoon.

The second half of the musical recaps what happens when the super rich face ruin — ruin not in the sense of going hungry but of having to stop buying luxury goods in bulk. With his timeshare empire hanging in the balance, Abraham’s David transforms from Santa Claus to Ebenezer Scrooge, belligerently withdrawing into his home office like a beaten general plotting a counteroffensive and treating Jackie like a trophy wife who has lost her golden sheen.

Ferrentino extends the timeline beyond the documentary to include what happened to the family in the years since the film was released and Jackie took to the spotlight like a Real Housewife given her own spinoff. The federal bailout worked wonders for the haves, like the Siegels, while the have-nots were left to fend for themselves — casualties of questionable mortgage practices and the “more, more, more” mantra of America. But no one escapes the brutal moral accounting, not even Jackie, after she suffers a tragedy no amount of retail therapy will ever make right.

“The Queen of Versailles” has grown tighter since its tryout last summer at Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre, but it’s still an unwieldy operation despite the impeccable showmanship of Michael Arden’s direction. The problem isn’t the production but the musical’s shifting raison d’être.

The first act hews to the documentary in a flatly straightforward fashion. The making of the film becomes the invitation to tell Jackie’s story in the mythic terms she favors. The musical indulges her not with a smirk but with a knowing smile. It’s the culture that’s skewered rather than those who adopt its perverted values.

But not content to be a satiric case study in how the Siegel family story connects “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and “Dynasty” to the shallowness and cruelty of Donald Trump’s America, the show aspires to the level of tragedy. Achieving great emotional depth, however, isn’t easy when wearing a plastic surgery mask of comedy.

Schwartz has composed an American time capsule of Broadway pop, with as much variety as “Wicked” though with less bombast and no real standout blockbuster numbers. The score moves from the zingy send-up of “Mrs. Florida” and “The Ballad of the Timeshare King” in the first act to the more maudlin “The Book of Random,” in which vulnerable Victoria gives vent to her suffering, and “Little Houses,” in which the modest lifestyle of Jackie’s parents (played by Stephen DeRosa and Isabel Keating) is extolled in increasingly grandiose musical fashion, in the second.

Strangely, one of the show’s most captivating songs, “Pavane for a Dead Lizard,” is about a reptile that starved to death because of Victoria’s negligence. The number, a duet for Victoria and Jonquil, doesn’t make importunate emotional demands and is all the more poignant for its restraint. (White’s Victoria and Hopkins’ Jonquil come into their own here, letting down the defensive armor of their recalcitrant characters.)

Melody Butiu, who plays the Siegels’ Filipina nanny and indispensable factotum, has a readier place in our hearts for all that she has had to sacrifice to support her distant family. Her material lack exists stoically in the shadow of the family’s monstrous excess.

In “Caviar Dreams,” Jackie proclaims her “Champagne wishes” of becoming “American royalty.” Chenoweth, whose comic vibrancy breaches the fourth wall to make direct contact with the audience, relishes the humor of Jackie without poking fun of her, even when singing an operatic duet with Marie Antoinette (Cassondra James). But the material never allows Chenoweth to emotionally soar, and the fumbling final number, “This Time Next Year,” requires her to land the plane after the show’s navigation system has essentially gone blank.

“The Queen of Versailles” is designed to bring out all of Chenoweth’s Broadway shine. She never looks less than perfectly photoshopped, but the production ultimately overtaxes her strengths. New musicals are impossible dreams, and this is a whopper of a show, daunting in scale and jaw-dropping in ambition. If only Chenoweth’s dazzling star power didn’t have to do so much of the heavy lifting.

With Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim (left) by his side, U.S. President Donald Trump oversees the signing of a ceasefire agreement between Thailand’s Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul (second from right) and Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet (right) on the sidelines of the 47th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Sunday, October 26, 2025. File Photo via The White House/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 6 (UPI) — The United States on Thursday lifted a Biden-era arms embargo on Cambodia following several high-profile meetings between officials of both countries.

The notice filed by the State Department with the Federal Register that explains the Trump administration was removing Cambodia from the International Traffic in Arms Regulations list due to Phnom Penh’s “diligent pursuit of peace and security, including through renewed engagement with the United States on defense cooperation and combating transnational crime.”

The embargo was placed on Cambodia in late 2021 by the Biden administration to address human rights abuses, corruption by Cambodian government actors, including in the military, and the growing influence of China in the country.

It was unclear if any of those issues had been addressed.

“The Trump administration has completely upended U.S. policy toward Cambodia with no regard for U.S. national security or our values,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., said in a statement criticizing the move to lift the embargo.

“There has been broad bipartisan concern about the Cambodian government’s human rights abuses and its deepening ties to Beijing.”

The embargo was lifted on the heels of Deputy Prime Minister Prak Sokhonn meeting with Michael George DeSombre, U.S. assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, in Cambodia on Tuesday.

On Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with Tea Seiha, another Cambodian deputy prime minister, in Malaysia, where the two agreed to restart “our premier bilateral military exercise,” the Pentagon chief said in a statement.

President Donald Trump has received much praise from Cambodia for his involvement in securing late July’s cease-fire and then last month’s peace declaration between Thailand and Cambodia, which had been involved in renewed armed conflict in their long-running border dispute.

During Tuesday’s meeting between Prak and DeSombre, the Cambodian official reiterated Phnom Penh’s “deep gratitude” to Trump “for his crucial role in facilitating” the agreements, according to a Cambodian Foreign Ministry statement on the talks.

Meeks framed the lifting of the embargo on Thursday as the Trump administration turning a blind eye to Cambodia’s “rampant corruption and repression … because the Cambodian government placated Trump in his campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize.”

“That’s not how American foreign policy or our arms sales process is meant to work,” Meeks said.

Cambodia in August nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of his historic contributions in advancing world peace,” the letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated.

On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.

The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.

On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.

“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.

Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.

“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.

The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.

Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.

Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.

“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.

Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.

On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.

The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.

As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.

This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.

The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.

In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.

“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.