A ROUND-UP OF NEWS REPORTS
TAYLOR SWIFT
Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has been named as the moststreamed global artist on Spotify for 2023.
Music fans helped her achieve 26.1 billion streams worldwide over the past 12 months, with the 33-year-old recording a special video message for the people who listened to her songs the most.
Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, Drake, Travis Scott, SZA and Lana Del Rey were also included in the top ten global artists list from the streaming giant. Flowers by Miley Cyrus was the most streamed tune of the year, with SZA’s Kill Bill in second place and As It Was by Harry Styles coming in at No. 3.
Un Verano Sin Ti by Bad Bunny was the most listened-to album of 2023 on Spotify, followed by Taylor’s Midnights.
HENRY KISSINGER
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. The Germanborn former diplomat was a key adviser to America during the Cold War and, despite leaving office in the 1970s, continued to advise leaders from President Bill Clinton to President Joe Biden.
Paying tribute last week, President George W Bush said: “America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices. I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family. When he later became Secretary of State, his appointment as a formerr refugee said as much about his greatness as it did America’s greatness.”
O Shane MacGowan,, frontman of Anglo-Irish punk band The Pogues, has died at the age of 65.
DAVID WALLIAMS
David Walliams and the producers of ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent have come to an “amicable” resolution after the former show judge’s conversations were leaked to the Guardian newspaper.
David, 52, had sued producers Fremantle for misuse of private information and breach of data protection laws after he was recorded discussing contestants during filming breaks in January 2020. He later apologised for the “disrespectful comments” and left the show, on which he had been a judge since 2012, last year.
High Court case documents alleged that the leak had had a “profound, severe and at times, very worrying effect on [David’s] mental health”. The children’s author also said his earnings had been “severely reduced” as a result of the story.
JAMIE LYNN SPEARS
Jamie Lynn Spears is one of two stars to quit I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! due to medical reasons. Britney Spears’s younger sister, 32, left the hit ITV show last week after she struggled with missing her two children and was frequently seen crying while in the camp.
“I hate it here, this is where people go to have the worst days of their lives,” she said shortly before she left.
Her fellow contestant, restaurant critic and broadcaster Grace Dent, had left the show just days
