Chess Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Jamie Lang A quarter-century after lending his voice to Z in Disney’s CG feature “Antz,” Woody Allen is set to return to the recording booth and narrate the upcoming Spanish animated short “Mr. Fischer’s Chair,” which will formally add several key co-producers during this year’s Annecy Festival. The film’s directors have also given Variety an exclusive look at early concept art for the project.

The new bombshells entering the Love Island villa have been revealed.Trey Norman and Jessy Potts’s entrance into the famous villa was teased at the end of Tuesday night’s episode (25 June) – in the aftermath of the Heart Rate challenge.Trey is 24 from Doncaster and is a Commercial Insurance Broker, while Jessy is 25 from Leicester and is a Brand Partnerships Associate.Trey isn’t afraid to make his mark on the villa as he says: “I’d say I’m charming and someone that goes after what they want, I’m not afraid to articulate my feelings. I'm going to the Villa to find the girl of my dreams so it may ruffle feathers with the boys.” He continued: "I’m not a people pleaser and someone who’s afraid to step on toes, I’m going in to find a connection so will be going after what I want from the get go." Of the ladies in the villa, he says he is looking for: "Someone who backs your dreams and ambitions, loyalty is also a big one for me." He added: "All the girls are beautiful, I’ve got my eye on all of them.

Former cruiserweight world champion Johnny Nelson believes Tyson Fury could retire after Saturday's undisputed title fight against Oleksandr Usyk - if he suffers a "devastating defeat".

House of the Dragon stars, Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy, might feud on-screen, but in real life, they both agree going viral and becoming a meme is not a good experience.

Stuart Sucherman Edward L. Scanlon was the ultimate insider. The long-serving NBC executive was a hugely influential player in the life of the network during the decades when it was owned by RCA and later General Electric. Scanlon was involved in everything from corporate recruiting and personnel vetting to labor negotiations to high-level M&A activity during his 44 years with RCA, Hertz and NBC. He was a close confidant of GE chairman Jack Welch. But Scanlon never courted the spotlight, preferring to stay behind the scenes. In 2001, as Scanlon prepared to retire from NBC, the New York Times published a rare profile that described him as “NBC’s Negotiator and Fixer.” Here, veteran media consultant and corporate recruiter Stuart Sucherman pays tribute to his longtime friend and colleague. Scanlon died March 17 in Naples, Florida, one day before his 90th birthday. The role that Ed played at NBC for 30 years is hard to define.

Coronation Street star Jude Riordan has addressed an exit from the soap after some fans were left concerned. The actor is best known for playing Sam Blakeman in the ITV soap but has also simultaneously starred as Tyler Croft in the Sky comedy, Brassic.

Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder are getting back together again!

Angelique Jackson Following the success of “The Curse,” Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder and A24 are teaming up again to take on the cutthroat world of chess. The studio has won the rights to the hot feature package “Checkmate,” based on a book proposal by author Ben Mezrich, whose works were adapted into “The Social Network” and “Dumb Money.” The story centers on what has been described as the “biggest scandal in the history of chess,” following the controversial 2022 head-to-head match between Grandmasters Magnus Carlsen, then world champion, and Hans Niemann, during which the latter was accused of cheating.

Things get worse before they get even worse for Roy Cropper in Coronation Street next week while Liam Connor faces his appearance in court, Daisy Midgeley's got her tail between her legs and Maria Windass' paranoia gets the better for her.

Annette Bening‘s first major TV series role has won the five-time Oscar nominee the Best Actress prize at this year’s Series Mania.

Has Bianca Censori been playing chess this whole time while the world has been assuming she’s been in Trouble?!

EXCLUSIVE: “Plan to leave something behind so your name’ll live on / no matter what the game lives on,” says Nas on his 1999 album Nastradamus, and now the revered rapper is making some moves in a new game.

One of the BBC’s highest profile news presenters broke rules on impartiality by referring to transgender women as “males” live on air, the corporation has determined.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent A rare flagship indie producer left on the French market, Bruno Nahon‘s Paris-based company Unité is preparing to conquer international audiences with “Rematch,” a period psychological thriller chronicling the historical battle between world chess champion Garry Kasparov (Christian Cooke, “That Dirty Black Bag”), and IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. The sprawling show, directed by Yan England (“The Red Band Society”) and co-created with Nahon and André Gulluni (“Sam”), was commissioned by Arte in France and has already been sold by Federation Studios to major outlets around the world, including HBO Europe for Spain, Portugal, the Nordics, Iceland, Baltics, Central Europe, Greece and the Netherlands.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Polish public broadcaster Telewizja Polska (TVP) has added feature film “Shattered Games” to its international sales slate alongside rom-com film “The Love Buzz” and historical series “The Bay of Spies.” “Shattered Games” explores Poland’s rich history and influence in the game of chess. The Polish national chess squad, known as the “Golden Team” in Poland, won the world chess championship in Hamburg in 1930, and was renamed by the German press as the “Bombenmannschaft” or “Bomber Crew.” “The matches the team played are still to this day described in chess textbooks as examples of masterful moves and games,” TVP said in a statement.

By Photography by Brynn Whitfield hasn’t been on a date in months. She’s trying not to care about finding love, but she’s curious about how I’m doing it. I just got ghosted by a skater boy, I tell her, sitting in her favorite corner booth at New York café Sant Ambroeus.

After weeks of schedule shake-ups, Coronation Street fans were treated to a rare weekend episode on Sunday night (February 11). Due to the football airing last Wednesday, the ITV soap's usual airing pattern was altered so that viewers could still get their Weatherfield fix.

National Board Game Day. Celebrated on April 11, the holiday aims to elevate tabletop games to the lofty heights of appreciation they deserve. Historical evidence suggests we’ve been playing games since time immemorial, or at least since survival gave way to spare time.

reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a 72-page report alleges that the 19-year-old champion likely received illegal assistance in more than 100 online games, the latest of which occurred as recently as 2020. Those matches included contests in which prize money was awarded.

allegations that chess grandmaster Hans Niemann cheated in matches against Magnus Carlsen, new evidence reveals that one of Niemann’s coaches admitted to cheating. According to emails reviewed by Motherboard, grandmaster Maxim Dlugy acknowledged he cheated in his own tournaments in 2017 and 2020 on Chess.com.The 56-year-old has been suspected of this for years and was banned from the website in 2017.But in the emails to Chess.com chief chess officer Daniel Rensch published Wednesday, Dlugy discloses that students from his Chess Max Academy were watching him play in a Chess.com tournament and that one of them used chess AI to feed him moves. In one email, Dlugy wrote that in 2017, he was playing in a tournament on Chess.com in front of his students and was crowdsourcing moves from them — which is against Chess.com’s play rules.“I am now positive, that one of the kids, was using an [sic] program on his cell while this was going on,” Dlugy admitted.

Twitch, where she livestreams games and personal content with her sister, ­Andrea, 18.Her numbers have shot up this year — in January, she had just 61,000 fans on Twitch — as the pandemic forced people indoors without many competitive sports to watch.She also has more than 250,000 followers on Instagram and more than 25 million views on her Youtube channel BotezLive.Now she’s gotten a second boost from the hugely popular Netflix show “The Queen’s Gambit,” a period drama about a female chess